Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Face book and Twitter Partial to Indian (and Israeli) Interests (JR217)


Face book and Twitter Partial to Indian (and Israeli) Interests (JR217)
Possible reasons
Facebook-Reliance Jio deal:  The Financial Times has reported that,  Facebook is in talks to “buy a multibillion dollar stake” in Mukesh Ambani’s digital venture Reliance Jio. If it comes through, this deal would greatly expand Facebook’s footprint in the Indian digital market. According to the FT story, the social media giant was on the verge of signing an agreement for a 10% stake when the negotiations were disrupted by coronavirus-related travel bans. India is a key market for both Facebook and its subsidiary, WhatsApp: this would explain the partiality of  FACEBOOK  my comments : Source The Hindu
Dawn expose  : Twitter
The spectre of an internet clampdown has once again reared its ugly head. This time though, the perceived cause is the social media companies — the digital gatekeepers who rally behind the idea of free expression for all.
In the past few weeks, several users have complained that their accounts or tweets were suspended or withheld for posting about events in India-held Kashmir. The Pakistan government specified about 200 accounts that were suspended to Twitter, accusing the platform of aiding India’s quest to silence Kashmiris and their supporters.
Among the many people whose accounts have been reported recently, President Arif Alvi also received a notice from Twitter alerting him on a complaint it received requesting for removal of his tweet on Kashmir. Although Twitter did not find the tweet to be in violation of its rules and took no action, its content moderation policy [or the lack of it] has come under intense scrutiny.
On its part, Twitter has repeatedly — in correspondence with Dawn — maintained that it enforces policies judiciously and ensures impartiality of all users, regardless of their political beliefs and country of origin. However, it does not comment on the reasons that allowed certain accounts or tweets being censured.
The content withheld tool allows governments or authorised entities to request Twitter to censor content on a country by country basis. The Pakistan government, too, has often used the tool against journalists and activists, who have in the past year shared similar legal notices from the platform.
Twitter says it provides transparency through a combination of efforts. This includes providing direct notice of removal requests to affected users (when not otherwise prohibited), the use of visual indicators within the service (an alert showing withheld content), and by publishing the underlying legal demands (e.g court orders) on Lumen, which serves as a public repository for content removal requests.
A list of legal requests from the Indian Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology on Lumen suggests that all of the censured accounts belonged to Kashmiri users or those posting in support of the cause. The Indian government cited Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 against tweets it said were in violation of its law. The reported content was then withheld from access in India.
The more problematic aspect is that the database does not include all legal requests sent by India. Since Aug 14, according to the database, India sent six legal requests. Evidence shared by users of the platform with Dawn indicates otherwise. One such example is the legal request sent to journalist Arshad Sharif, which is not uploaded on the database.
Twitter’s inconsistency and inaction on its own rules thus not only creates a level of mistrust and lack of confidence in the company’s reporting process, it also sends the message that Twitter does not take the region’s politics seriously. Another issue allowing the Indian government to control access to information is the lack of human moderators at Twitter that enable platform manipulation. In the past weeks, many Pakistani celebrity accounts have been suspended for ‘impersonation’.
A Dawn analysis revealed that a network of accounts — ETF Associates and BMJ Youth to name a few — were involved in mass reporting Pakistani accounts leading to their suspension. The ETF_RW account was created in June 2016 and had reported over 339 accounts in 2019 alone. One of the accounts it got suspended had a whopping following of 90,000 users. The BMJ Youth account was created rather recently (January 2019) but still managed to report prominent accounts, such as the handle of focal person to the Punjab chief minister on digital media, Mashwani Azhar who is followed by over 33,000 people.The two accounts have now been suspended by Twitter, but more similar networks propped up soon after.
 Users posting about Kashmir have also complained that they have been ‘shadow banned’ by Twitter. Shadow banning, as the platform defines it, is deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster. Others, particularly Indian users, have also reported that their tweets in support of Kashmir are marked as “sensitive content” on the platform which means it will not be visible unless someone clicks on it.Twitter has refuted the accusations outright. “We do not shadow ban. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology,” it claims. It does not elaborate further. And that’s where the problem lies; the platform when confronted with questions of how it decides what permissible speech is online provides brief policy statements, rather than taking the opportunity to provide their users with more details about how they control the content.
While Twitter has its share of problems, to blame its opaque moderation for non-compliance to Pakistan would not be entirely correct. To hold Twitter accountable is a process beyond emotive, reactionary statements. With over 34 million users, a local presence and a revenue making industry that is India, Pakistan (with nearly a million users) must consider whether digital collaboration is among its long-term priorities.
Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2019
My experience with Facebook

I (Javed Rashid ) have a number of groups that I manage on Facebook, these include : Kashmir Struggle News Dissemination Platform ( 53700 members as of Mar., 25, 2020, 7,41 am) ; and KBDS:  Kashmir- Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions:  India (292 members as of Mar., 25, 2020, 7,41 am), The former  named is constantly  threatened by vulgar irrelevant posts. These undesirable posts are repeated in a large numbers, all of this forced us to revise the posting policy to pre approval of posts. More seriously, however, I also write blog(s) that carry weekly and monthly update of news and analysis related to: Struggle for freedom of Kashmiri people; Human rights violations of Indian armed forces in Indian Occupied Kashmir; and Muslims in India (monthly update ). Facebook has banned my two blogs (at Blogger https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1888686140647377049#allposts,  and Word Press, https://wordpress.com/posts/javed47rashid.wordpress.com) , The blogger site carries a large number of posts but the Word Press site has few posts. Face book has deleted a post from The word Press site https://javed47rashid.wordpress.com/2020/03/11/northern-areas-gilgit-and-baltistan-jr-213/, this and other posts including the weekly and monthly updates are based on verifiable sources, sources are also quoted in the updates. All of this makes it difficult to convey to my viewers the updates mentioned above.


Hindu right wing and Muslims: Apr., 14, 2020: The campaign uses hashtags like #CoronaJihad, #CrushTablighiSpitters, #MuslimMeaningTerrorist, and #BioJihad to spread misinformation on platforms like Facebook and Twitter That meeting and the revelation that members of the group tested positive for coronavirus was the spark that kickstarted a virulent hate speech campaign online that has seen far-right Hindu nationalists weaponize Facebook and Twitter to attack and threaten Muslims in India.That campaign, baseless and hateful, claims that Muslims are purposely infecting swathes of the Indian population. The campaign uses hashtags like #CoronaJihad, #CrushTablighiSpitters, #MuslimMeaningTerrorist, and #BioJihad on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The posts are being shared with hundreds of millions of people by supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his political party. The campaign shows how fears about the spread of the coronavirus have merged with longstanding Islamophobia in India, putting the lives of India’s 200 million Muslims at risk. Activists in India say they have been flagging the issue with both Facebook and Twitter for weeks, but that very little has been done to stop the spread of the hate speech. “I really don't think that any of the platforms have an excuse because it’d be one thing if they were inundated like everybody else, wondering what's happening, but they've been receiving reports of many of these individual pages and individual handles and this content way before this,” Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the executive director of Equality Labs, a South Asian community technology organization, told VICE News. “And the response has not been appropriate given the gravity and the danger of the speech   Modi and the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment for some time, but the current wave of Islamophobia began after authorities pinpointed the Tablighi Jamaat meeting in early March as a source of many infections in India.  Now, some of the same right-wing figures who used social media to amplify attacks on the Muslim community during last year’s controversy over the Citizenship Amendment Act, which granted non-Muslim immigrants to India citizenship, are using the Tablighi Jamaat meeting to claim that Muslims are purposely spreading coronavirus across the country. In addition to hashtags, fake videos purporting to show Muslims purposely sneezing on people are being shared widely on Twitter and Facebook. One of the most popular videos being shared claims to show a Muslim man intentionally coughing on somebody. One tweet showing the video was retweeted more than 4,300 times before it was removed. The account that posted it, however, remains active, posting obviously anti-Muslim content. The video, of course, is fake, and was filmed in Thailand long before the pandemic began, but that didn’t stop the videos being shared by verified accounts linked to the BJP.  The hateful accusations against India’s Muslim population have been shared by BJP officials, national television channels and journalists aligned with the government. Analysis by Equality Labs shows that the groups sharing the anti-Muslim hashtags on Facebook are supporters of Modi and the BJP, or groups related to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organization. They include the Indian Defense Force (2.8 million followers), BJP For India Page (580,000 followers), and West Bengal BJP Supporters (350,000 followers). According to data from the social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle, between March 29 and April 3 the #coronajihad hashtag alone has had over 249,733 interactions on Facebook. On Twitter, almost 300,000 conversations took place with the #coronajihad hashtag, with over 700,000 accounts engaging in those conversations, according to data from social media analysis tool TalkWalker. The potential reach of those conversations was 170 million accounts.  Facebook said it had removed a number of hashtags flagged by Equality Labs, and searches on the platform for #coronajihad and several other hashtags did not return results on Friday morning — but there are many other similar hashtags still in use on Facebook.  Modi, the BJP, and its social media army have been leveraging the power of social media for years to cement its position as the most popular party in the country and to push anti-Muslim sentiment. The BJP has become adept at hiding its behavior to give the party and the prime minister plausible deniability. But there are signs the social media attacks on Muslims in recent weeks were coordinated.   https://www.vice.com/en_asia/article/akwmyj/indias-hindu-nationalists-are-inciting-hate-by-claiming-muslims-are-spreading-coronavirus

Facebook bats for India: Dec., 31, 2019: Facebook has blocked live streaming of the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation's (PBC) news bulletins for highlighting Indian atrocities in occupied Kashmir,Radio Pakistan reported on Monday. In its report, Radio Pakistan has included screenshots of earlier warning messages received from the social-media giant, dating back to May, warning the public broadcaster of violating "community standards on dangerous individuals and organisations". Specifically, these posts were from news stories about the death anniversary of Hizbul Mujahideen leader Burhan Wani in July and the curfew imposed after the death of Zakir Musa, also a Hizbul Mujahideen commander, in May.  In 2016, Facebook came under fire for censoring dozens of posts related to the death of Wani, reported The Guardian. Photos, videos and entire accounts of academics and journalists as well as entire pages of local newspapers were removed for posting about the occupied valley. The Indian government had imposed curbs on newspapers as well but residents of occupied Kashmir complained that censoring posts on Facebook made information blackouts worse. Due to limited access to newspapers and TV channels, journalists and news organisations would keep readers informed by updates on social media, until the social media giant started censoring news articles and updates about occupied Kashmir. The Facebook account of Kashmiri journalist Huma Dar, who is based in the United States, was deleted soon after she posted pictures of Wani's funeral and was told that she had "violated community standards" when she wrote to the social media giant. "The biggest irony is that I get death threats, I get people saying they’ll come and rape me and my mother. None of those people, even when I complain to Facebook, have ever been censored," she told The Guardian. More recently, Twitter faced criticism after rights activists voiced concerns over the removal of hundreds of tweets critical of the Indian government's policies in occupied Kashmir, reported Al Jazeera. According to the Al Jazeera report, a study by a media watchdog revealed that nearly one million tweets had been removed since 2017.  Of the 17,807 content restrictions made by Facebook globally, the highest number — over 31 per cent — of the requests originated from Pakistan between January and July 2019, according to the platform’s latest transparency report released in November. Facebook restricted 5,690 items within Pakistan during the first half of 2019, as compared to 4,174 pieces from the second half of 2018.  https://www.dawn.com/news/1525252/facebook-blocks-live-streaming-of-pbc-news-bulletins-over-kashmir-coverage-radio-pakistan
Facebook and Kashmir: Jan., 2, 2019: FACEBOOK often struggles with its principles regarding freedom of speech for users versus its bottom line, which requires keeping powerful stakeholders happy.This appeared to be on display once again on Monday, when the company blocked live streaming of the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation’s news bulletins highlighting Indian atrocities in occupied Kashmir.  There is a broader pattern, since the death of Burhan Wani in 2016, of Facebook methodically censoring news and opinion on the Kashmir crisis. Based on news reports and details shared by users, censorship activities occur in short, sharp spikes around current events connected to India. It is reasonable to assume that this policy is set in place through lobbying by India, one of Facebook’s critical markets. The question of who is a terrorist and who is a freedom fighter; which struggle is legitimate and which is not, comes down to who has more sway with the social network, which is largely determined by size and scope of the market, not by higher principles or nuanced examination of the issue at hand . The internet is still unpredictable; companies rise and fall, and if Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do not offer their users the freedom they seek, they will go elsewhere. This is a fundamental the platforms must recognize sooner rather than later. https://www.dawn.com/news/1525581/facebook-vs-kashmir

Facebook and India: Apr., 24, 2020:  Reliance snapped up a cool $5.7 billion (Rs 43,574 crore) investment from Facebook in return for a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms, the subsidiary that will house a majority of the empire’s digital assets. Ambani also has more than a few reasons to be happy. Facebook’s investment and corresponding valuation is higher than the average Rs 4.2 trillion enterprise value given to the company by top brokers such as Citi Investment Research, Kotak Institutional Equities, JP Morgan India and Goldman Sachs India.  RIL’s total investment in Jio currently stands at about Rs 1.8 lakh crore — one way of looking at this therefore is that what effectively cost the company about Rs 18,000 crore (a 10% stake) is now being sold for over three times that amount (Rs 43,574 crore  While Ambani no doubt has plans for unlocking the value of the Jio ecosystem’s apps, one key line of attack was unveiled with the Facebook announcement – mixing WhatsApp with JioMart. Both Zuckerberg and Ambani, the latter more so, went out of their way to describe how the deal will give Reliance access to the over 400-million-strong database of WhatsApp as it seeks to jump-start its commerce business under JioMart. Under this partnership, the company said, it would offer consumers the ability to access the nearest kirana, which can deliver products and services, after transactions via JioMart using WhatsApp. “In the very near future, JioMart and WhatsApp will empower nearly three crore small Indian kirana shops to digitally transact with every customer in their neighbourhood. This means all of you can order and get faster delivery of day-to-day items from nearby local shops. At the same time, small kiranas can grow their businesses and create new employment opportunities,” Ambani said in a video on Wednesday. This ‘phygital commerce’ strategy – where your local kirana store is on WhatsApp and you send him a message to order your groceries – appears to be the first major project that Facebook and Jio will work on. “Facebook wants to use WhatsApp for e-commerce opportunities with small businesses. Amazon, Flipkart can’t compete with Jio-Facebook because they don’t have an edge on data. While in the short term, there may not be much market impact as due to COVID-19 nothing significant shall happen in the next 3-6 months, however in the long term the alliance will not only counter competitors like Amazon and Flipkart, but will rupture the entire e-commerce ecosystem in the country,” said Waris. There are also broader mutterings about how Jio and Facebook could eventually create a super-app, along the likes of WeChat in China  The second explanation doing the rounds is that Facebook’s investment in Jio is a safe bet on avoiding the future wrath by India’s authorities. There has never been more scrutiny of ‘Big Tech’ and the challenges posed by foreign companies in terms of law enforcement and how they handle the sensitive personal data of Indian citizens and organisations. The theory here is that COVID-19 pandemic will only accelerate these protectionist concerns and by picking up a near 10% stake in Jio, Zuckerberg appears to be buying ‘protection’ in a manner of speaking. Or at the very least, Reliance and Facebook may find more common ground when it comes to their lobbying efforts in the future.    2019  ”. https://thewire.in/business/four-reasons-why-facebook-is-buying-a-nearly-10-stake-in-mukesh-ambanis-reliance-jio

Facebook and BJP: Jun., 9, 2020: The failure of Facebook to moderate content helped fuel religious strife in India and other countries, a report by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights has said. The report cites examples of problematic content shared on Facebook in India – especially targeting Muslims, some by “affiliates” of the ruling BJP – and pointed out that the social media giant failed to take it down. The observations were part of a broader report where the Stern Center, which aims to study how businesses approach human rights issues in the countries where they function, sought to highlight the importance of content moderation. The report was released on 8 June and is titled, “Who Moderates the Social Media Giants? A Call to End Outsourcing”. It is meant to trigger better pay and work conditions for content moderators, whom it describes as crucial to keeping internet a safe space. The report looks at how social media firms Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube moderate their content and the ways the process can be improved. The “antagonists, some of them affiliated with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatia Janata Party (sic)” have “once again… exploited Facebook in one component of a broader anti-Muslim movement in India”. As an example, the report cites a Facebook video from 2019 where a “group of men affiliated with the militant wing of the BJP (sic) brandished knives and burned the effigy of a child while screaming, “Rohingyas, go back!” The report adds that Facebook didn’t take down the post, “on the theory that it was posted by groups claiming to be news organisations and wasn’t directly linked to violence”. “The link may not have been direct, but in June 2019, dozens of Rohingya homes were burned in Jammu, where the video and others like it were shot,” it adds, offering a hyperlink to a report in The New York Times. words like “parasites”, “rats”, and “rapists” to describe Bengali Muslims    





FaceBook India Tilt: Aug., 16, 2020: An India right-wing politician who has called for violence against Muslims and threatened to raze mosques continues to remain active on Facebook and Instagram, even though officials at the social media giant had ruled earlier this year the lawmaker violated the company's hate-speech rules, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The move to not proceed against T. Raja Singh, a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, came after Facebook's top public-policy executive in India, Ankhi Das, opposed applying the hate-speech rules to Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence, the newspaper quoted current and former employees as saying. According to the report, Facebook employees charged with policing the platform had concluded by March that Singh's rhetoric against Muslims and Rohingya immigrants online and offline not only violated hate-speech rules but he also qualified as "dangerous" for his words could lead to real-world violence against Muslims. Yet, instead of following the officials' recommendation to permanently ban him from the platform, the company allowed Singh, a member of the Telangana Legislative Assembly, to remain active on Facebook and Instagram, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers. The decision was influenced by Das, whose job also includes lobbying the Indian government on Facebook’s behalf, telling staff members that punishing violations by politicians from the BJP would "damage the company’s business prospects in the country", which is Facebook’s biggest global market by number of users, the exposé said.The way Facebook has applied its hate-speech rules to prominent Hindu nationalists in India "suggests that political considerations also enter into the calculus" of policing hate speech, it added. Current and former Facebook employees cited in the report said Das’s intervention on behalf of Singh is part of "a broader pattern of favouritism by Facebook toward Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu hard-liners. While on the one hand Facebook refused to censor hate content by BJP lawmakers, a couple of years ago the social media giant had come under sharp criticism for censoring content by journalists and academics against Indian oppression and violence in the occupied state of Jammu and Kashmir. In 2016, Facebook censored dozens of posts related to the death of Burhan Wani, a locally revered Kashmiri freedom fighter, reported The Guardian. Photos, videos and entire accounts of academics and journalists as well as entire pages of local newspapers were removed for posting about the occupied valley. During that time, the Indian government had imposed curbs on newspapers but residents of occupied Kashmir complained that censoring posts on Facebook made information blackouts worse. Due to limited access to newspapers and TV channels, journalists and news organisations would keep readers informed by updates on social media, until the social media giant started censoring news articles and updates about occupied Kashmir. The Facebook account of Kashmiri journalist Huma Dar, who is based in the United States, was deleted soon after she posted pictures of Wani's funeral. She was told that she had "violated community standards" when she wrote to the company."The biggest irony is that I get death threats, I get people saying they’ll come and rape me and my mother. None of those people, even when I complain to Facebook, have ever been censored," she told The Guardian. https://www.dawn.com/news/1574532/facebook-refused-to-check-hate-speech-by-indias-bjp-fearing-business-fallout-wsj-report Facebook and Muslims: Aug., 31, 2002: The social media platform has been used to incite and condone violence against adherents of the Islamic faith, from Myanmar to Kashmir to Palestine The social media giant Facebook poses an existential threat to vulnerable Muslim communities. This assessment is based on how Facebook has failedto prevent its platform from being used to incite mob violence against adherents of the Islamic faith. Palestinian and Kashmiri human rights activists have long complained of having their accounts suspended or permanently deleted after posting videos of Indian and Israeli soldiers carrying out human rights violations. "Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended," said Yanghee Lee, a UN investigator who in 2018 described the social media platform as a vehicle for inciting "acrimony, dissension and conflict" and driving the Rohingya Muslim genocide in Myanmar. A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal has revealed that when it comes to the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable Muslim minorities, Facebook not only puts profits and politics before social and moral responsibility, but also before its stated user policies or what it calls "community standards" - as evidenced by how it refused to punish a right-wing Indian politician for advocating violence against Muslims because doing so would be bad for the company's business These revelations should be seen not as an isolated incident, but rather in the broader context of Facebook managing its business in a way that puts it in lockstep with the Hindu nationalist agenda - because India, with its more than 290 million Facebook users, represents a key market. "For years now, verified Facebook pages of BJP leaders such as Kapil Mishra have routinely published hate speeches against Muslims and dissenting voices. The hate then translates into deadly violence, such as the anti-Muslim attacks in Delhi that left many people dead in February in some of the worst communal violence India's capital had seen in decades," observed Indian journalist Rana Ayyub. "... It's clear that Facebook has no intention of holding hate-mongers accountable and that the safety of users is not a priority." In June, after The Gambia requested in a US District Court for Facebook to release "all documents and communications produced, drafted, posted or published on the Facebook page" of Myanmar military officials and security forces, in order to evaluate what role they played in the mass violence against the Rohingya, Facebook indicated that it would evaluate the request. The hopes of Rohingya activists were buoyed when Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, acknowledged the company had found "clear and deliberate attempts to covertly spread propaganda that were directly linked to the Myanmar military". "I wouldn't say Facebook is directly involved in the ethnic cleansing, but there is a responsibility they had to take proper action to avoid becoming an instigator of genocide," Thet Swe Win, who founded Synergy, a group devoted to encouraging social cohesion in Myanmar, told the New York Times. This month, however, Facebook rejected The Gambia's request, arguing that the release of "all documents and communications" by key military officials and police forces was "extraordinarily broad" and would constitute "special and unbounded access" to accounts. The profit motive apparently drives Facebook to stand with powerful states and against the victimised and downtrodden. The idea that Facebook is an impartial platform built on fairness and equality for all is patently absurd, given that it is a for-profit corporation that bases its commercial decisions on the quest for ever-higher revenues. There is much evidence of this in both India and Israel/Palestine. A 2019 report noted that WhatsApp, the messaging app now owned by Facebook, blocked or shut down around 100 accounts belonging to Palestinian journalists and activists, banning them from sharing information and updates as Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza in November 2019. Facebook has also been accused of showing favouritism to Israel by categorising vague or even commonly used Arabic terms or slogans as "incitement to violence," while simultaneously turning a blind eye to Israeli accounts that openly call for "death to Arabs". Facebook has revealed a "political bias in favour of elevating the Israeli narrative while suppressing the Palestinian one," observed +972 Magazine. Marwa Fatafta, a Palestinian writer and policy analyst, says that Facebook "cannot use ignorance as an excuse," noting that "economic and political incentives" explain why social media companies comply with Israeli government requests. In Kashmir as well, journalists and human rights activists have for years accused Facebook of censoring content that casts Indian security forces in a negative light. Four weeks after India revoked Kashmir's autonomous status in August 2019, Facebook suspended scores of accounts over posts on the disputed territory, including "Stand With Kashmir," a page owned and managed by a Kashmiri American based in Chicago."Why is it that only Muslims get blocked? Facebook is being one-sided by supporting the atrocities committed by the Indian army. Other people can say whatever they want, but if Muslims say something, we get blocked. It is not neutral," Rizwan Sajid, a Kashmiri activist, told the Guardian. What's clear is that Facebook, like much of the international community, appears to hold a bias against Muslims, because the international community is oriented towards the economic and strategic interests of non-Muslim majority countries, where the social media giant exacts the lion's share of its profits. Amarnath Amarasingam is an expert in violent extremism and the author of Sri Lanka: The Struggle For Peace in the Aftermath of War. He told MEE: "Many of the more frontline people at Facebook dealing with hate speech and incidents of violence against minorities - often Muslims - in places like India, Myanmar [and] Sri Lanka are quite knowledgeable, and I've found them to be eager and open when it comes to reaching out to experts and learning about the ground realities. I fear that at the leadership level, different calculations are at play."When it comes to the choice between social responsibility and responsibility to shareholders, it would appear that Facebook is eschewing measures that might impede delivering greater profits to the latter https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-facebook-threatens-vulnerable-muslim-communities