When Meta suspends influential political accounts, who loses?

Meta must decide whether to suspend Hun Sen’s Facebook page and the archive of recent Cambodian political history it contains.

In January 2023, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen live-streamed a speech on Facebook in which he threatened his opponents, vowing to send “gangsters” to their homes and to rally ruling party members “to protest and beat [them] up.”

The speech came back to haunt him on June 29, when Meta’s Oversight Board recommended that the company suspend the prime minister for six months for breaking the platform’s rules against threatening or inciting violence.

Later that day, Hun Sen beat the company to the punch and deleted his own page. It was a stunning move in Cambodia, where the prime minister has used the platform to trumpet his policy positions and lash out at his opponents to the nearly 14 million followers he has amassed since joining Facebook in 2015.

In full: https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/meta-oversight-board-cambodia-prime-minister/

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