America may no longer be the home of the free but it’s still the home of the brave, provided one intends to use Facebook as a social media tool for organizing political efforts frowned upon by the current administration.
While the governments of 74 countries “demanded information” on approximately 38,000 Facebook users in the first six-months of 2013, fully 50% of those requests came from American authorities, according to Facebook.
The social-networking giant is the latest technology company to release figures on how often governments seek information about its customers. Microsoft and Google have done the same.
Facebook and Twitter have become organizing platforms for activists and, as such, have become targets for governments, as has been revealed in the recent NSA data mining scandal. During anti-government protests in Turkey in May and June, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called social media “the worst menace to society.”
Given the rate at which the Obama administration seems to “demand” information on users of social media from the various companies involved, it would seem his mentality isn’t that much different from Erdogan’s.
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