Emails show how Facebook responded to requests by Turkey to censor content during the authoritarian government's 2018 military offensive against Kurds
or risk getting shut down entirely. “I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg. My latest with @JustinElliott: https://www.propublica.org/... Jane Lytvynenko / @janelytv : “I am fine with this” Just like that. https://twitter.com/... Kyle Orton / @kyleworton : One can say Facebook did it for bad reasons, but there is nothing inherently wrong in censoring a terrorist group like the #YPG/#PKK, especially one that has used Facebook to recruit Leftist extremists from the West and around the world. https://www.propublica.org/... @rmac18 : Facebook's actions here, as laid out by the ProPublica story, provide a playbook for in-power regimes. Don't like something? Threaten to block FB in the country and kill ad revenue. FB may cave and its execs will likely be “fine with this.” Seth Frantzman / @sfrantzman : Authoritarian regimes and authoritarian social media unsurprisingly work together. Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company's Business https://www.propublica.org/... Jake Hanrahan / @jake_hanrahan : As Turkey launched a military offensive against the Kurds in neighbouring Syria in early 2018, @Facebook's top executives sided with Turkey (the number 2 jailer of journalists worldwide) and helped silence Kurdish support. Sheryl Sanberg is truly amoral. https://www.propublica.org/... Ghanem Nuseibeh / @gnuseibeh : Facebook censors on behalf of Turkey. Last year, we raised issue of Facebook appointing a Muslim Brotherhood member to its oversight board. Result is Facebook now censors on behalf of Turkey's Muslim Brotherhood government https://twitter.com/... Nathan McDermott / @natemcdermott : In Turkey, an authoritarian leader asks Facebook to shut down an opponents page and they do it on request. Here, in the US, it takes years promoting conspiracy theories about child trafficking to percolate and incite violence before they step up. https://twitter.com/... Justin Elliott / @justinelliott : NEW: Internal Facebook emails show how Sheryl Sandberg OK'd a censorship request from an authoritarian government. Execs cited “p.r. fires” and acceded to Turkish request to pull page of Kurdish party. https://www.propublica.org/... w/ @jackgillum https://twitter.com/... Patrick Cosmos / @veryimportant : every week either mark zuckerberg or sheryl sandberg just straight up puts “that's fine if this costs a bunch of lives or jobs or whatever lol. we should do it, for the money” in writing and it gets openly reported and nothing happens or changes about it https://twitter.com/... Meghan Bodette / @_____mjb : Kurdish activists and their supporters have tried to draw attention to the censorship of pro-Kurdish content on Facebook for a long time. Extensive work by @JustinElliott and @jackgillum for @ProPublica showing that this policy comes from the top. https://twitter.com/... Yaman Akdeniz / @cyberrights : Excellent story from @jackgillum which shows how FB in secrecy deploys geo-blocking in Turkey and is just a phone call from the authorities. Only recently FB said its decision to have representation in Turkey didnt change its process for reviewing government requests. Yeah right. https://twitter.com/... Matt Drange / @mattdrange : When Facebook marked the page as verified w/ a blue check mark, “created negative coverage on Turkish pro-government media.” When FB “removed the check mark, it in turn ‘created negative coverage [in] English language media including on Huffington Post.’” https://www.propublica.org/... Pui-Wing Tam / @puiwingtam : Terrific reporting by @propublica on how Facebook handled a censorship request from Turkey. “I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's No. 2 executive. https://www.propublica.org/... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : So much can be learned from this communication: - Mark and Sandberg, lock step but Sandberg despite being COO has also been able to avoid answering categories of questions under oath. - Kaplan keeping governments happy - integrity run by PR/lobbying (Elliot/Kaplan) https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Jake Sanders / @posmarketer : Amid a 2018 Turkish military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with Turkey's demand to block the page of a mostly Kurdish militia. “I am fine with this,” Sandberg wrote. An advertising platform, not a media company, made this decision.... https://www.propublica.org/... Richard Tofel / @dicktofel : New: @propublica has emails from @Facebook as it weighs bowing to Turkish pressure to suppress the page of an opposition group, contrary to its own standards . What does FB care about? PR concerns— and, ultimately, staying in business locally https://www.propublica.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
ProPublica's email trove lands in a stretch of coverage already questioning how Facebook governs speech outside the US. The Guardian had pressed the company on why its political ads policy was too US-centric with no explanation for other countries, and BuzzFeed reported that employees and fact-checkers saw divisive-content decisions overruled with little transparency. The new reporting supplies the sharpest case yet: internal emails showing Turkey demanded removals during its 2018 offensive against the Kurds, with the threat of being shut down entirely — and Sheryl Sandberg writing "I am fine with this."
The pattern matters because it moves the accountability question from product design to executive sign-off. Combined with earlier reporting that Zuckerberg and others shelved research into Facebook's polarizing effect, it depicts a company making consequential speech decisions privately, at the top, rather than through stated policy.
First-order effects
- Facebook blocked content targeting Kurds at the Turkish government's request under explicit threat of a nationwide ban, with Sandberg personally approving — putting the company's own executives on record as the decision-makers.
- Kurdish users and political pages lost access to the platform precisely when the military offensive made it their primary channel.
Second-order effects
- Other governments facing restive minorities now have a documented template: threaten market access and Facebook complies, so expect more state takedown demands framed as counterterrorism.
- The disclosure hands Oversight Board critics and regulators concrete evidence that Facebook's public principles bend under bilateral pressure, strengthening arguments that ad-hoc executive decisions need external review.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform speech rules in authoritarian-leaning markets get set by the most aggressive government rather than by published policy — pushing regulators toward requiring transparency around state takedown requests as a condition of operating.
- Facebook's global-governance model drifts toward country-by-country exception handling, which is structurally incompatible with a single set of community standards and invites fragmentation or forced exit from markets where compliance costs become politically untenable.
The trend: Platform content governance is increasingly negotiated bilaterally between tech companies and states, with market-access threats — not published policy — deciding what billions of users can say.