Facebook removes terrorist organisation Jamat' ud' Dawah's official page

MUMBAI: Social networking service Facebook removed the official page of Jamat' ud' Dawah on Tuesday, a day after the micro blogging site Twitter suspended the account of the Pakistan-based banned terrorist organisation’s chief Hafiz Saeed, who is accused of plotting the 2611 Mumbai terror attack.

Although Facebook didn’t put out any official statement, the company’s community standards prohibit organisations with a record of terrorist or criminal activity from maintaining a presence on its site. On Twitter, however, Saeed’s account was back within minutes of being suspended by the website, with a new handle under the name of @Hafezsaeedjud1.

The first tweet from this account was, “We will soon release our official statement on Twitter’s double standards”. By Tuesday, though, Twitter suspended this account too. Till late evening on Tuesday, JuD’s Arabic account was operational, as was its Google + page. The decision by Twitter and Facebook comes at a time when social media is under intense pressure from the global community for promoting “hate speech” in the name of freedom of expression.

The debate on this issue became intense in September, when the beheading video of American journalist James Foley by the terror group ISIS went viral on the micro blogging site. Twitter immediately decided to implement a policy of removing any content related to a deceased person, if was found to be offensive to the immediate family members.

“Immediate family members and other authorised individuals may request the removal of images or video of deceased individuals, from when critical injury occurs to the moments before or after death,” Twitter said.

It is unclear, though, whether social media companies like Facebook and Twitter will have much control over the regimes that would want to quash dissent citing the excuse of hate speech.