Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has written to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to ban all Islamophobic content. This comes as a response to France Prime Minister’s comment on the murder of a French teacher by an Islamist.
The Prime Minister of Pakistan has warned of a spike of radicalization of the Muslims. He also hit out at the French President Macron for attacking Islam.
The issue
The boycott began when President Emmanuel Macron criticized Islamists. He vowed not to “give up cartoons” depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
Macron posted the comments about the beheading of a teacher, Samuel Paty, outside his school in Paris. This teacher had shown cartoons of Prophet Muhammed in a class on free speech.
A trending hashtag of Boycott French Products was trending on Twitter on Sunday. Saudi Arabia called the boycotts. It is the Arab world’s largest economy. Jordan and Qatar also issue similar boycotts.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on Friday decried the brutal murder that has shaken France. But it also criticized the “justification for blasphemy-based harassment of any religion in the name of freedom of expression.”
Khan’s open letter
Prime Minister Imran khan posted an open letter on his Twitter account. He urged Facebook to pan islamophobic content on its social media platform. Growing Islamophobia was encouraging extremism and violence worldwide, mostly through the medium of social media platforms like Facebook, he said in his letter:
“I would ask you to place a similar ban on Islamophobia and hate against Islam for Facebook that you have put in place for the Holocaust.”
Khan, in his letter, also mentioned that Islam was continuously associated with terrorism.
Facebook’s policy
Mark Zuckerberg led Facebook to update its hate speech policy earlier this month. It banned content that denied or distorted the occurrence of the Holocaust.
Facebook generates a transparency report now and then. As per its latest report dating December 2019, Pakistan was the source of the second-highest number of requests to curb content. Russia stood at first.
“One cannot send a message that while hate messages against some are unacceptable, these are acceptable against others,” Khan said.
Facebook’s response
Facebook’s spokesperson said that the company has taken a strong stance against the speech and did not allow racial-ethnic, national, or religion-based attacks on its platform.
“We’ll remove this hate speech as soon as we become aware of it,” the spokeswoman said in a statement, adding that Facebook had “more work to do.”
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