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.
Yeah. It’s really weird what FB suspends/deletes from people’s accounts. It seems to me that the censors are complete right wing authoritarians (which may be the case, those types are drawn to censorship work). But given the generally open nature of the internet and how FB itself sorta started, it’s still rather surprising.
That’s frustrating and sad. The internet and social media are perhaps the most powerful ways for quickly getting the word out and getting movements started. What chance to people have when even those are limited?
Why even bother the Islamists and terrorists with it when the cowardly corrupt governments themselves can do it? Pakistan has restricted and banned Facebook on and off for “blasphemous content” and “challenging the state” … oops, that’s redundant. YouTube has been blocked for a few years now too (to my latest knowledge, still is).
We should demand a lot more than this from Facebook. There are lots of things Facebook could do to better protect its users but unfortunately Facebook’s business plan is surveillance. It’s not even entirely clear why; advertisers don’t pay Facebook much more than they pay other enormous sites. Presumably Facebook is selling demographic lists such as “vulnerable people”, “gullible people” to anyone who asks as other surveillance-oriented sites such as Amazon certainly are. I’ve no idea whether they make any money out of this, but profitability isn’t necessarily the goal of big companies, is it?
At the moment, companies are valued at insanely many pounds if they collect lots of information about their customers. I suspect this bubble is going to burst because they don’t seem to be making much actual money out of it. Presumably we’ll be even more screwed if the bubble does burst. What are they going to do with all this data?
But back to the more immediate concern. Facebook can and certainly should do a lot more to protect its users. The measures described above are a minimum. I won’t bore everyone with my usual tinfoil-hat rant about how companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, the usual suspects, should care about privacy. Christ, even Apple and Microsoft are cleaning up their acts by allowing users to encrypt their own data so that the companies hosting that data can’t read it or allow any governments to read it, with or without a court order or gun to the head.
Facebook could and should be a place where civil disobedience happens. Facebook could make it possible all the while protecting the pesky disobedient people. It could protect pesky people from the governments that want to silence or kill them.
It could but won’t because investors love Big Data despite the fact that nobody has really managed to make any money from it yet.
I’m not saying Safebook would be profitable or attract bubble investors. I’m saying they should stop feeding the bubble with other people’s data.
I’ve been working on a document/online course about how to disobey your government safely, to some extent. It’s hard, It’s really hard. How to buy and anonymously use a mobile phone, for example, is a dozen pages long and has more caveats than advice.
It shouldn’t be that hard. Facebook should make it easier to hide. I’m hardly the first to predict the pricking of the Big Data bubble, but if it happens I’ll look like a genius and if it doesn’t I’ll probably still find a way to say I was right.
Governments have no business at all looking at our data. Let’s get over the nothing-to-hide yawning bullshit and start pushing for tools that let people be activists, safe from their governments. The first few steps are *insanely* easy. Let’s take them together, holding hands.