Google’s move to pull the plug in China is an extreme example of the kinds of decisions Internet companies operating abroad are often up against: If they want to do business, they have to abide by local laws, which can include restrictions on speech. And since the United States has some of the most permissive freedom-of-speech laws in the world, American companies must adapt in order to do business even in parts of the world that are culturally very similar to the U.S.

Western European countries, which receive top marks from Freedom House for online openness, are far less tolerant than the U.S. of hateful speech and images. In Germany, where distributing swastikas is considered hate speech and is illegal, regulators recently investigated a complaint that Facebook was not adequately enforcing national hate-speech law. But it’s inconceivable that Facebook would close down its service in Germany just because the government asks for more censorship than the First Amendment would permit.

In countries with more repressive governments, companies routinely receive requests to take down a much wider range of content that violates local laws. In Russia, for example, speaking ill of public officials can lead to costly libel suits; just across the Black Sea, “insulting Turkishness” is punishable by fines and jail time.

Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, says companies should generally submit to governments’ requests for censorship, if it means they can keep delivering their services. But when they take down content from their platform, Rowland says, the company must be transparent.

“If these companies do whatever they’re capable of doing to publicize that their content is being screened, monitored, and sometimes censored by governments, I think there’s a really good argument that maintaining a social-media presence is inherently a liberalizing force,” Rowland said.

To that end, Google, Facebook, and Twitter all publish a detailed annual transparency report, where they show the number and type of content-takedown or user-information requests they received, and the number they complied with, from each country where they operate. The companies also lay out their rationale for dealing with these requests: Facebook, for example, says it checks every incoming request for “legal sufficiency” and “reject[s] or require[s] greater specificity on requests that are overly broad or vague.” But even the most thorough transparency report can be difficult to access in the countries where the reported censorship is taking place.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a prominent Internet-privacy advocate at New America, says companies should start thinking about how they will deal with free-speech issues even before they start doing business in a repressive state. “It’s about anticipating in advance what positions you’re going to be put in, and deciding in advance whether that’s an acceptable position to be in,” MacKinnon said. Many companies undergo a “human-rights impact assessment” before they expand to a new market with potential censorship pitfalls.