As technology continues to become more central to how we live and interact with each other, new moral quandaries have opened that were never seriously considered in the past. For example, the introduction of life support systems immediately created legal and moral issues, as families battled for loved ones’ right to live, or in many cases, a right to a peaceful death.

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Likewise, the widespread use of social media has morally challenged the public on issues such as privacy, censorship, and freedom of speech. This week, Facebook received some criticism for censoring a Rohingya Muslim group named ARSA. The Rohingya Muslim group is currently facing a violent Myanmar military engaged in ethnic cleansing, according to the top UN human rights official. The Myanmar government, on the other hand, has labeled the Rohingya Muslim group to be a terrorist organization, after it attacked several police posts earlier this month.

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Basically, there is a lot of disagreement whether the Myanmar government or the Muslim group have committed human rights violations, although most third parties regard ARSA members as a persecuted people in the Buddhist majority country. Facebook sided with the Myanmar military, and added ARSA to their internal list of terrorist organizations. This resulted in the removal of several posts that described some of the attacks on the Muslim group, some of which contained only text. Other media such as videos or pictures of the conflict have been taken down as well.

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Facebook has dealt with similar issues before, and released a statement back in June concerning their plans on dealing with terrorism on their web service. Their potential solutions involved greater cooperation with government organizations, and a greater use of artificial intelligence to quickly sort out content that violated their terms of service. Both of these solutions has proved to be controversial in the past, whether it concerned government overreach, consumer privacy, or mistakes made in automatically removed content.

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It is unlikely that any company the size of Facebook will ever be totally without controversy, or that any similarly disruptive technology could change our lives so completely without introducing new problems. Some writers have hypothesized that no one company should be able to control such a significant component of free speech - the ability to interact with two billion people all over the world is not a power that should be taken lightly. Perhaps the changes that occur inside Facebook and other social networking companies over the next few years will provide a comment on this line of reasoning.