Last November, the New York Times reported that Facebook has developed software that would allow them to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas. The software would allow a third party outside of Facebook (e.g. a government) to decide what to censor. The tool was developed specifically to help the company get into China, which has banned Facebook since 2009 because of strict censorship rules. If made available, it could, of course, also be used by any other governments (Saudi Arabia, Russia, India, the U.S., etc.) to similar effect. In our recent workshop, you considered the responsibilities of companies such as Facebook in the face of potential government censorship and requests for user information. Among the moral reasons Facebook may have to allow governments to control what would be censured on Facebook in their countries, are its responsibilities to its shareholders to maximize profits and potential responsibilities to others who are impacted by its actions. Among these could be its users, employees, and communities in which it operates. Imagine you are Facebooks CEO and write a letter to the American public explaining and justifying your decision about how or what to allow governments to censure material on your site in their countries. Your letter should do the following: 1. Present the different moral considerations bearing on your decision, identifying the value conflicts that make this decision a challenging one. 2. Present your company’s principled position on government censorship and justify it in relation to the model of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that you believe best captures a company’s obligations. To do this you should explicitly state the CSR model and explain why you believe it accurately portrays what companies are responsible for. 3. Your paper should make use (and cite) of at least four relevant and credible sources (e.g. academic journals, NY Times, Time Magazine, etc.). These should all be placed in a work cited page at the end of your paper (either the APA or MLA citation format is fine). The work cited page does not count toward your word count.
