The Facebook Papers Must Be Shared With Outlets Globally ⇥ wired.com

Annia Ciezadlo, Wired:

The team that is running the consortium is making the same mistake that Facebook did: By excluding the non-Western world from a global discussion of its own human rights, they have been ensuring that those rights will continue to be violated. When authoritarian governments use Facebook to surveil, harass, and intimidate people, those people need to be at the table when those abuses are being documented. People from non-Western countries deserve a chance to report on those who have clearly been reporting on them. This is a moral imperative, but also a practical one. ​​If a consortium set up to expose Facebook’s global abuses treats institutions in the global south as irrelevant, second-string, or unworthy of equal access to the truth, how can it hold Facebook accountable for doing the same thing?

Ideally, the Facebook Papers — which are largely comprised of internal discussions, and not necessarily final decisions — would be made freely available to anyone interested in their contents. But I understand the risks with doing so, and I hope that many more news outlets are granted access, especially those in developing nations where Meta’s products are exempt from metered mobile data.