The social media giant, Facebook, has allegedly resorted to arbitrarily suspending the account of social media user Anshul Saxena, who often debunks left-wing propaganda and supports nationalist causes.
On March 20, Anshul Saxena had tweeted about the deletion of his Facebook account after he had written about an art event scheduled to be held in Bangalore. The art exhibition named ‘Nudity with Mangalsutra’ was scheduled in Bangalore to depict a theme which disrespected Mangalsutra wearing Hindu women by portraying them in despicable positions, bringing disrepute to Hindu customs and traditional symbols.
1. I talked against ‘Nude with Mangalsutra’ exhibition on Social Media platforms including @facebook.
Today Morning, Facebook deleted my page https://t.co/bAcy8Gdnh0 for spreading Nudity. This is Freedom of Speech. Isn’t @fbnewsroom?
One who reported my page uploaded this image pic.twitter.com/OXQZZttk83
— Anshul Saxena (@AskAnshul) March 20, 2019
After Anshul Saxena raised an objection to such art exhibitions being held, Facebook allegedly resorted to deleting his account initially. However, according to Anshul’s tweets, Facebook had also given him the option of ‘appeal’ and further assured him of restoring his account in a short span of time. Anshul Saxena had also accused Facebook of deleting his own personal account which had nothing to do with the page which criticised anti-Hindu accounts.
Hi @facebook
On which planet do you operate that you don’t respect earth’s time.
It’s been a week that you restored @AskAnshul ‘s page but it hasn’t come back
First you removed the page wrongfully and now taking time to restore it. What’s your problem? pic.twitter.com/kn9cyUJ9np
— Monica (@TrulyMonica) March 25, 2019
However, it has been six days since the deletion of his account, Facebook is yet to restore his account. Even though Facebook had assured Saxena of restoring his account immediately, it has not been restored so far yet. According to Anshul, Facebook has not issued any clarification with respect to the arbitrary deletion of his account.
It has often been alleged that Social Media giants censor users for debunking left-wing propaganda. In fact, the allegations are not just against Facebook alone. The micro-blogging site Twitter has been accused of censoring right-leaning accounts arbitrarily as well.
Recently, Twitter officials were also summoned by Parliamentary Committee on IT headed by BJP MP Anurag Thakur asking them to present their views regarding the issue of bias towards the right-wing twitter accounts.
