Arifur Rahman tells us that Facebook is letting Islamists shut down bloggers and activists.
Few days ago, I came across an article being shared by Atheist Republic, discussing how they are under attack after publishing the Rainbow Kaaba. I got interested and read the whole article where the author described how their Facebook page, their Admins are getting abuse from Islamists, threats and how their Facebook accounts are getting suspended for no good reason.
To my surprise, I wasn’t surprised, at all!
Because, we, the Bangladeshi bloggers, have suffered this kind of attack all too often. This kind of mindless attack, which I call Facebook terrorism, was thrown at us since the dawn of blogging history. But until now, I used to think attacks such as this were only limited to Bengali speaking blog-sphere. We are the most attacked blog community, and have to deal with the worst kind of Islamic infestation. four of our bloggers / authors were killed earlier this year due to Atheistic / Science blogging / writing.
After reading the Atheist Republic article, it now looks like, this problem is not confined within Bangladesh anymore. The Global Islamic digital terrorism has now acquired enough resource and network to expand its attack anywhere in the internet. Atheist Republic, its Facebook page and its Admins are also now targets of digital violence.
I will explain below, for the unsuspecting bloggers, how Facebook terrorism is leveraging the ‘numbers matter’ strategy, and how the weak moderation policy of Facebook is harming freedom of speech and thought.
As you may know there’s 1.6 billion Muslims around the world. A great number of them have access to the internet and own a Facebook account. We potentially have millions of Muslims primed for protest against defamation of their religion (prophet).
Islamic authoritarian system works on a top-down approach. Social and psychological structure of pious muslims rely heavily on ‘scholarly’ person(s) who announces strategy and ‘to do’ actions. These actionable commands are then obeyed by average Muslims without thinking and thereby creating waves of action within a very short time span. However, for this kind of instruction sets to work, the average Muslim must be able to understand and excute without too much hassle and disruption.
Read the whole thing. It has screengrabs and artwork and different colors – it’s an aesthetic treat as well as a call to action and primer on what’s happening.
At the end –
What can we do? I think there’s little we can do as individuals.
But as a collective… We can…
1. Have our Facebook accounts secured with dual authentication.
2. Inform Facebook authorities to enable ‘captcha’ for reporting, so that direct link abuse can be reduced.
3. Make Facebook authorities aware that this sort of abuse is happening and make a policy level change so that groups congregating for such violence can be reported and with enough evidence Facebook should remove these groups and / or take precautionary actions against perpetrators.
end of the day, we must awake our selves that something dark is engulfing us. If we don’t know how to make ourselves aware, we will soon have nowhere to go.
Thanks for Reading. Please don’t forget to Share and let others know.
Regards,
Arif Rahman
London, UK.
[I am a Bangladeshi Blogger living in the UK. I am lucky (so far) that I’m in the UK. My friends have been killed and my name is in the ‘List’ as Arifur Rahman]
He has since been suspended from Facebook.