Facebook trying to avoid regional conflicts

For users in the Golan Heights, Facebook asks whether you live in Israel or Syria

Having registered over 300 million users, 120 million of which who log in daily, Facebook is indisputably the most popular social networking site in the world. It comes with no surprise then when we discover that in those cities of the world where regional disputes still affect people daily, Facebook will also be pulled into the political mess.

One such example is Golan Heights, a highly contested region between Israel and Syria taken by Israel in 1967. In spite of the fact that the mountainous land is classified internationally as Israeli-occupied, Facebook used to only let users who entered in the region to list their country as Syria.

After protests from the Pro-Israel Web site www.honestreporting.com, however, Facebook modified the way it assigns Golan Heights residents their country.

"We have enabled users in Golan Heights to choose either Syria or Israel in the listings," a Facebook spokesperson told CNN. "We currently have the same dual-listing options for the West Bank settlement, which is listed in both Palestine and Israel.

"We deal with the listings for disputed territories on a case-by-case basis, and with Golan Heights we decided a dual listing made sense in this instance."

Google addresses the issue via analogous means in its Google Maps application. Searching for Golan Heights will highlight a point on the map surrounded by dashed lines, indicating that the boundaries are disputed. Zooming into the lines reveals when and why the boundary was created: one says 1949 Israeli-Syrian Armistice Line, for example.

The road Facebook takes will probably be held under closer scrutiny than Google because the site is so popular with activists. Even Syrian activists rely a great deal on the site’s networking, in flagrant disobedience towards the Syrian government, which has banned Facebook and other social networking sites.

As Facebook continues to grow, complications of this kind will inevitably continue to crop up. But if the site maintains a strict neutral stance, it should not run into too much trouble (at least with the majority).