14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is bringing peace in the Middle East, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said one week ago. How exactly is that possible, you might ask? Well, the social network is giving the young of Lebanon a wider view of the world. Doesn't seem like enough to me, but it is better than doing nothing about the problem. Unfortunately, the Middle East is a tad greater than that, and another messy situation arises.
Israeli settlers on the West Bank have voiced their complaints that the auto-complete function on their Facebook profiles located them in Palestine. A big problem, as a group doesn't even recognize Palestine as being a country. Granted, it only has 43 members so far, but they claim that FB remove all references to the not-a-country Palestine and leave Israel as the only option for those in that particular area.
The solution that was found was to let users pick their country - and it's the only viable option short of going against the groups militating for each of the two. But then again, choosing one will automatically make supporters of the other angry and an online war is nothing Facebook can properly handle. This is one area that social networks shouldn't even attempt to approach.
The West Bank is a territory under Israeli army occupation right now, and the Jewish settlers that saw Palestine being auto-completed must have felt like what's going on at the moment with the borders has little to no importance for Facebook, that simply rubber-stamped them as belonging to a country that they have been struggling to not be a part of.
The two groups, for Israel and Palestine, are quite numerous, with 400,220 and 34,419 members respectively, all waiting for the negotiations to be finalized as to where the borders will be settled.