This article is so poorly written it is embarassing. In addition to the silly errors like "races the question" and and apparently being unaware of the word "euphemism", it buries what I hope is its main point--that Facebook should be more transparent--at the bottom of the article.
But Facebook is quite transparent about government censorship, even in the United States; see here: https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/20...
From what I can see it is much more transparent (and much more active) than Twitter, which for some reason the article praises.
It seems only to be castigating Facebook for "censoring" inmates--who are not, themselves, even the ones posting to Faceboook--and then for not reporting information about those removals. It then links to articles about an overreaching New Mexican prison which sentenced an inmate to ninety days in solitary confinement for refusing to tell family and friends to remove Facebook photos. It neglects to mention how Facebook is responsible for that and more importantly that the sentence was thrown out by prison officials (probably because its unconstitutional as hell and they know it). That particular example wouldn't even be a particularly good lead-in to an article about correction department overreach. It is much less useful here.
It is reasonable for Facebook to have terms of service which disallow third party access to user profiles, to suspend profiles of users which violate the ToS, and to have a reporting page specific to a class of user which is likely to violate an individual term. It is also reasonable for Facebook not to report this data as it is essentially private information about the inmates and their use of Facebook. Facebook has more responsibility to protecting its inmate users than it does to reporting that information to the rest of us.
But Facebook is quite transparent about government censorship, even in the United States; see here: https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/United%20States/20...
From what I can see it is much more transparent (and much more active) than Twitter, which for some reason the article praises.
It seems only to be castigating Facebook for "censoring" inmates--who are not, themselves, even the ones posting to Faceboook--and then for not reporting information about those removals. It then links to articles about an overreaching New Mexican prison which sentenced an inmate to ninety days in solitary confinement for refusing to tell family and friends to remove Facebook photos. It neglects to mention how Facebook is responsible for that and more importantly that the sentence was thrown out by prison officials (probably because its unconstitutional as hell and they know it). That particular example wouldn't even be a particularly good lead-in to an article about correction department overreach. It is much less useful here.
It is reasonable for Facebook to have terms of service which disallow third party access to user profiles, to suspend profiles of users which violate the ToS, and to have a reporting page specific to a class of user which is likely to violate an individual term. It is also reasonable for Facebook not to report this data as it is essentially private information about the inmates and their use of Facebook. Facebook has more responsibility to protecting its inmate users than it does to reporting that information to the rest of us.