Facebook has become one of the most important tools on the internet for spreading news, keeping in touch, posting emo song lyrics, or whatever else you want to do with it. Some think a business needs a Facebook page to be legitimate. Local businesses make their own Facebook accounts. Large companies are expected to have an “online presence.”
Facebook has a lot of power over what you can do when on the site. There are buttons everywhere to report offensive comments, or pages, or messages.
Posting things like nudity, or sexually explicit content can get your post deleted; it can cause your account to be deleted if you do it too much.
Pages can be deleted if they are offensive.
Sometimes Facebook can get a little carried away when deleting pages. It can seem like they are targeting one group. Sometimes, they really are targeting one group.
Now, Facebook is going a little too far. They are deleting pages of Atheist groups that are from the Middle East, or at least appear to be from the Middle East.
In April, Facebook removed six pages of atheist groups in the MENA region (Middle East – North Africa) for “violating community standards.”
#facebookVSfreespeech pic.twitter.com/9yHjWHD7q7
— Ali Utlu (@AliCologne) May 2, 2016
In February, Facebook removed 10 of the largest Arabic-speaking atheist groups with a combined 100,000 members.
They were all shut down for the same reason:
“Heavy reporting campaigns that are organized by “cyber jihadist” fundamentalist Islamic groups, especially for the removal of any anti-Islamic group or page.”
A surge of “fundamentalist” Muslims reported the groups and pages on a massive scale, using large groups of people who reported the pages by hand, or set up computer programs to do it for them.
One organization, Atheist Alliance – Middle-East and North Africa, is speaking out about it. AAMENA says Facebook is targeting them and demand that Facebook changes the way that it addresses violation reports, so the freedom of speech is preserved.
They have adopted the hashtag, #FacebookVSFreeSpeech, and there are plenty of memes out there hating on Mark Zuckerburg for this.
This video features some Atheists and Agnostics speaking out against religion in Arabic:
Featured image via Facebook post.
