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Protesters Want Facebook to Return Money From Bashar Al-Assad's Election Ads

The campaign outside Facebook's London offices this morning ties in with broader questions around who should be allowed a platform on social media.
Image: The Syria Campaign

Outside of Facebook’s London offices this morning, you might have seen a trademark blue table offering a new product: “ads for dictators.” 

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a real Facebook campaign. A small protest arranged by the Syria Campaign was behind the stunt, which the campaigners reported was swiftly shut down by security.

The demonstration asked the tech giant to return any money it made from ads on the platform at the beginning of this month that promoted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s campaign before the recent elections in the country.

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The campaign group were alerted to the ads—specifically, sponsored posts promoting Assad’s Sawa (“together”) campaign page—when some of their friends noticed them popping up in their newsfeeds. After they brought attention to the issue shortly before the elections, Facebook removed the ads. But for the campaigners, that’s not enough.

“We hope to tell Facebook that it’s high time they gave back the money they took from Assad’s election campaign to the Syrians who really need it,” James Sadri, one of the campaigners, told me over the phone. “We all know there’s a dire crisis in Syria right now—the UN calls it the humanitarian crisis of our generation—and the idea that one of the main perpetrators of the violence, Bashar al-Assad, is spending precious funds on promoting his propaganda, and that Facebook is explicitly authorising that and then refusing to give the money back, is something that should change.”

He said they wanted to have a conversation with Facebook about what could be done with the funds, but that Facebook had refused to talk with them. It’s unknown how much money we’re talking about (it’s unlikely to be a huge amount given that the ads were only up temporarily), but for the campaigners it’s clearly more a matter of principle.

“Here is a man who is responsible for oppression of peaceful uprising three years ago, which has led to the death of 160,000 people,” said Sadri. “So by any judgment, this isn’t a guy who should be able to take out his credit card, or someone on his team do the same, and buy adverts on Facebook at the click of a mouse.”

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“The ads referenced are no longer on our platform. We terminated these ads,” a Facebook spokesperson said when I reached out to the company.

“We comply with all relevant Syrian sanctions and we do not permit ads originating from or targeting Syria,"

They also said that, “We have looked into this thoroughly, including reviewing IP address and payment information, and we have no evidence that these ads were ordered from Syria.”

But if there weren’t sanctions on Syria, would Facebook allow promoted content of this kind? I trawled through Facebook’s ad guidelines to see what clause might have been violated in this instance, but couldn’t find anything that would have seemed particularly relevant.

Perhaps the more pertinent question is (again, in absence of sanctions) should Facebook allow this kind of ad? That question ties in with a broader conversation that usually centres around non-paid platforms provided by social media.

We’ve seen sites like Facebook used prominently by other controversial (to say the least) political groups, most recently ISIS fighters. While many might not want to see posts of this nature on social media platforms, it’s something of an exemplary test case for the free speech debate.

Twitter’s decision to suspend some ISIS-affiliated accounts, for instance, was denounced by some as censorship. While social media platforms are privately owned, they’ve become such a mainstream means of communication to many that we’re uncomfortable with some guys in an office picking and choosing what expressions should and shouldn’t be allowed.

As for Facebook, Assad’s regular campaign page is still available, and Facebook’s comment to me nodded to the idea of free speech: “You’ll find a range of voices debating events in Syria on Facebook.”

It has to be noted at this point that Facebook isn't always a pinnacle of free speech. It’s come under fire in the past for the grey areas and subjective calls in its regulation of content, which has resulted in things like pictures of breastfeeding being removed while portrayals of violence are allowed to remain.

But what today’s protest highlights more than anything else is that attitudes differ when money changes hands. There’s an added sense of distaste if a company is profiting off controversial campaigns, rather than just permitting them to use a service like anyone else. That's something social media giants are no doubt aware of, which is why they have internal guidelines for advertising.

In this case, with sanctions in place, the matter is pretty clear-cut. For others, quite how far social media companies should police their sites beyond the letter of the law remains an unanswered issue.