When I first read that Facebook has an employee whose title is “global head of counterterrorism policy,” I was surprised. I had always thought of counterterrorism policies as things that governments, not companies, had.

But it turns out this distinction isn’t always as meaningful as I’d thought. One job of Facebook’s global head of counterterrorism policy—a national security expert named Brian Fishman—is to do what the US government wants done. This subservience would raise questions even if we didn’t have a president with a famously reckless foreign policy. But we do, and so far Facebook seems willing to abet it.

Consider President Trump’s deeply hostile policy toward Iran. Ostensibly its goal is to change Iran’s behavior, but both national security adviser John Bolton and secretary of state Mike Pompeo have advocated changing its regime. And there is concern among longtime Bolton watchers that this aspiration will lead to war.

Trump’s Iran policy consists of imposing economy-crushing sanctions, coercing other nations into joining in them, and doing various other antagonistic things. One such thing came last month when the Trump administration declared Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. This was the first time in history that the US had slapped the terrorist label on a foreign government’s military—or for that matter on any part of a foreign government.

This development alarmed some foreign policy observers, but it didn’t give Facebook pause. The day after Trump’s move, Instagram, a Facebook property, blocked the accounts of high-ranking Revolutionary Guard officers. And the next week The New York Times reported that Fishman had said Facebook would have zero tolerance for any group the US deems a terrorist organization.

So basically Trump can tell Facebook to de-platform any part of any foreign government—including, presumably, an entire foreign government—and Fishman, along with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will reply with a crisp salute? Under Facebook’s current policy, that would seem to be the case.

When I asked Fishman to justify this policy, he said it’s designed to keep Facebook on the right side of the law, which prohibits Americans from providing “material support” to any group deemed a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

But, I replied, the law goes on to spell out the things that would constitute “material support,” and none of them sound much like “letting these groups post on your social media platform.” Fishman said, “I’m not a lawyer. I’m a policy guy.” And apparently Facebook’s lawyers have advised the company to err on the side of caution. (By the way, in addition to respecting the government’s terrorist designations, Facebook has its own definition of a terrorist group, so the list of groups it bans goes beyond the government’s list of terrorist groups.)

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Of course, one way to get clarity on the law would be to not de-platform Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, see if Trump’s Justice Department tried to prosecute you, and be prepared to take the matter to court. But Fishman said Facebook has “no plans” to seek clarity via the courts.

It may seem amazing that Trump has the power to declare, in effect, that none of the 125,000 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard can have accounts on Facebook or Instagram. But that’s nothing. The Trump administration is said to be preparing to put the terrorist label on the Muslim Brotherhood, a social services and political activism network that has way more members than that in more than a dozen countries.

The heart of the Muslim Brotherhood is in Egypt. In fact, Trump’s push to deem the group terrorist came after Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, encouraged it during a White House visit last month. So, are members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood indeed, as the terrorist label would suggest, associated with the killing of innocent civilians?

Well, in the sense of being the innocent civilians who get killed. A few years ago President Sisi’s troops gunned down hundreds of them while they were peacefully demonstrating. What they were protesting was the fact that he had deposed Egypt’s democratically elected president (a Muslim Brotherhood member) in a coup.

David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times wrote last week that “even experts critical of the Brotherhood agree that the organization does not meet the criteria for a terrorist group,” and Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution has written that “there is not a single American expert on the Muslim Brotherhood who supports designating them as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.”