United States’ media company, Facebook, has banned Taliban and related contents from all its platforms including Whatsapp and Instragam.
The social media giant banned the contents, after the group, considered to be terrorists by some world governments, took over Afghanistan Capital, Kabul on Sunday, causing many citizens to flee the country including the American backed President, Ashraf Ghani.
Facebook spokesperson revealed to BBC that the organisation had been banned under its “Dangerous Organisation policies” which applied to all its platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp.
“The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under US law and we have banned them from our services under our Dangerous Organization policies,” they said
The ban, will ensure the removal of “accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support, and representation of them.”
“We also have a dedicated team of Afghanistan experts, who are native Dari and Pashto speakers and have knowledge of local context, helping to identify and alert us to emerging issues on the platform,” they added.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday, Adam Mosseri, the head of Facebook’s photo and video sharing app, Instagram said the company was relying on the Dangerous Organisations Policies “to proactively take down anything that we can that might be dangerous or that is related to the Taliban in general.”
“Now this situation is evolving rapidly, and with it I’m sure the risk will evolve as well. We are going to have to modify what we do and how we do it to respond to those changing risks as they happen,” he added.
With its track record of repression of human rights, Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan government has raised global concerns about the freedom of citizens under its rule.
However, Reuters report shows that the social media giant Facebook has designated the Taliban as a terrorist group and banned its content from its platforms.
But Taliban members have reportedly continued to use Facebook’s end-to-end encrypted messaging service WhatsApp to communicate directly with Afghanis despite the company prohibiting it under rules against dangerous organisations.
A Facebook Inc (FB.O) spokesperson said the company was closely monitoring the situation in the country and that WhatsApp would take action on any accounts found to be linked with sanctioned organisations in Afghanistan, which could include account removal.
On Twitter Inc, Taliban spokesmen with hundreds of thousands of followers have tweeted updates during the country’s takeover, Reuters claimed.
