Facebook’s platform coloniality: At the nexus of political economy, nation-state’s internal colonialism, and the political activism of the marginalized

Abstract

This article explores Facebook’s censorship of Kurdish political activism at the request of the Turkish government. I argue that Facebook’s censorship of political voices belonging to the marginalized Kurdish community is an articulation of platform coloniality, an outcome constituted by the intersecting of the social media giant’s global political economy imperatives with racialized and hierarchized conceptions of human worth. The effects of platform coloniality are exacerbated due to it being mediated by the Turkish nation-state’s internal colonial politics and militarist regional policies, thus intensifying the marginalization of Kurds inside and outside Turkey. Covered in a typical neoliberal discourse of freedom and human rights, platform coloniality represents a continuation of the age-old patterns of Western power and its flow toward the Global South.