As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighbouring Syria in early 2018, Facebook's top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People's Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted.

To be fair to Facebook, YPG is an armed group that fights the Turks, but at the time no one wanted to be giving into authoritarian government. Unless you were a Facebook executive. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's No. 2 executives wrote: “I am fine with this".

"The page caused us a few PR fires in the past", one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material.

However her words are coming back to haunt her as the YPG photos and updates on Turkish military's brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can't be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey.

Publicly, Facebook claims it cherishes free speech and is against a lot of Turkish efforts to censor posts and require firms have a legal presence in the country.

But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey's military campaign, Facebook sided with the government's demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were cantered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights.

"Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down."