DHAKA: Social Networking giant Facebook lebeled a Rohingya insurgent group a “dangerous organization” and ordered moderators to delete any material posted by the group itself or by users praising it, reports The Gurdian.
Amid international accusations that Myanmar’s military is engaging in “ethnic cleansing” of Rohingya, Facebook in fact restricted the posts mostly depicting the torture stories.
The decision, which the company said was made after an internal assessment of the group, came shortly before activists began complaining that the company was censoring posts about the brutal military campaign against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa) was placed on Facebook’s “dangerous organization” list in recent weeks, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed. The company’s community standards ban posts by or in support of such organizations, which it defines as groups engaged in terrorism, organized violence or crime, mass murder, or organized hate.
Facebook refused to comment on whether any of the other groups involved in the conflict that has seen more than 400,000 Rohingya flee the country have been designated as dangerous, or had accounts or posts deleted.
Myanmar’s military, which the top United Nations human rights official has accused of engaging in a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, has a verified Facebook page with 2.6m followers.
The government has numerous other official pages as well, and human rights observers have raised concerns that posts by Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader and a Nobel peace prize recipient, are stoking anti-Rohingya fervor.
Myanmar’s government declared Arsa a terrorist organization on 25 August, after the group coordinated attacks on police posts in the western state of Rakhine, killing 12 members of the security forces. Facebook said it did not make its decision at the request of the government, and that the decision was based solely on the group’s alleged violent activity, not its political aims.
BDST: 1024 HRS, SEP 21, 2017
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