Facebook lets users decide who has the Golan Heights

September 17, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments | |

picture-244As Facebook ramps up its growth abroad, it will have to contend with more highly-charged political conflicts. One of them is how to manage disputed territories like the Golan Heights, a mountainous region connecting Israel to Syria that was captured by Israel in 1967.

Until a few weeks ago, if you lived in Katzrin (also called Qasrin), a larger town in the region, it meant you lived in Syria according to your Facebook profile.picture-272

Not so anymore. People in the same town can now say they live in Israel after users formed a 2,600-person strong group called “Facebook, Golan residents live in Israel, not Syria” to lobby for the change.
picture-253Already, Arab news agencies Al Quds al Arabi and Al Bawaba are reporting that Syria may demand a boycott of the social networking site. Facebook already uses this approach with The West Bank and will probably continue it with other disputed regions like Kashmir. (The company skirts the “One China” issue — whether Taiwan is an independent nation or part of China — because the region is just called “Taiwan”).

As the world’s biggest social network, Facebook has had to deal with a long line of political or identity-based conflicts. It has allowed Holocaust denial groups to persist on the site, arguing that the importance of free speech outweighed the offensiveness of anything the groups created. However, it also banned neo-Nazi pages in Europe, saying that the pages were used to incite violence.

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • IGT
    If you've ever visited Taiwan and China. It'd be obvious to you that Taiwan is nothing like China regardless of what you think the national political debate may be.
  • Hm, I have never thought before about such kind of difficulties social networks may meet...
    Yes, it's rather difficult to solve such problems, and there is no ideal solution. However, allowing users to decide if they live in Qasrin, Syria, or in Katzrin, Israel, is a good compromise.

    And I fully agree that importance of free speech outweighs possible offensiveness. If there are no attempts to incite violence offensiveness should be admissible. Contrary decision is a way to shut up everybody, as offense is rather a subjective thing.
  • asowe
    who cares