Hong Kong chief executive election 2022: legal exemption in US law could be why Facebook did not follow YouTube in axing John Lee’s account
- YouTube terminated Lee’s campaign channel on Wednesday, citing compliance with US sanction laws, but fellow American tech giant Facebook did not follow suit
- But Facebook’s decision is a ‘qualified one’ and may yet change, says one expert
Facebook may have relied on a legal exemption in American law to allow Hong Kong chief executive candidate John Lee Ka-chiu to continue using the social media platform, legal experts have said.
It would help explain why the tech giant did not follow YouTube in delisting the former official’s account to comply with US sanction laws, choosing to allow his campaign page to remain albeit with caveats.
Lee, who was chief secretary before he announced he would run for the city’s top job, was among more than a dozen officials sanctioned by the United States in 2020 over Beijing’s imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong.
Asked whether the US government has been kept informed of the termination of Lee’s campaign page on the video-sharing platform, and whether sanctions would continue if Lee is elected, a US State Department spokesman replied: “We have nothing to offer on these questions.”
While the prohibitions brought on by Washington’s sanctions were vast and wide, lawyers and legal scholars said some exceptions could apply, depending on how much risk a company was comfortable taking on.
Facebook, one of the primary platforms relied on by the city’s former No 2, could have concluded that what the Beijing-endorsed candidate shared was merely information, one of the exemptions granted under US law. Lee is the sole candidate for the chief executive election on May 8.
“The information materials exemption applies whenever only information is being exchanged between a US person and a specially designated national, rather than a transaction,” said Ben Kostrzewa, who specialises in US sanction law at Hogan Lovells.
