Instagram, like other Meta-owned platforms, has once again demonstrated a clear bias towards left-liberals and Islamists. The social networking service on Thursday removed a post uploaded by a user named being_political and labelled it as fake information.
What is even more bizarre is that in the explanation for its arbitrary action taken against a 2012 photo shared by the user, the social media platform went on to cite an unrelated fact-check done by Boom Live in the year 2019.
It all started when a social media user Being Political took to Instagram to post an image of the 2012 Azad Maidan riots where a Muslim youth had desecrated the Amar Jawan Jyoti memorial. The user captioned the post: “On 11 August 2012 Raza Academy had staged a morcha at Azad Maidan ground to protest against the alleged atrocities on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.”
Instagram immediately removed the post with an overlay that read ‘False Information.’ Additionally, to buttress its claim, the social networking giant went on to share a fact check posted by Boom Live, which was completely bizarre as the fact check was done in the year 2019, while the picture against which the action was taken was of 2012.
As shared below, Being Political shared a screenshot, which showed the response of Instagram where it shared a fact-check from Boom Live as its third-party independent fact-checker.
Notably, Instagram claims that if a third-party fact-checker identifies the content as ‘fake’, one of the options the platform adopts is labelling the photo as ‘false information’ in an overlay which then does not allow you to view the photo or the video.
Here, presumably out of deliberation to always come out in quick defence of the leftists and Islamists, the platform hastened to label the content as ‘fake,’ and in its haste, employed an unrelated fact check by Boom Live as their third-party fact-checker.
In 2019, in the wake of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests in several parts of the country, the image of a Muslim youth caught in action while desecrating the Amar Jawan memorial at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan in 2012 resurfaced on social media. Social media users, then extensively shared the image with claims that the incident took place during the anti-CAA riots. Boom Live then fact-checked this particular claim. They also attested to the fact that the image was not from 2019 but from 2012.
Boom Live had, in fact, then claimed that they ran a reverse image search and found that the image was originally of Mumbai’s Azad Maidan where Raza Academy had staged a morcha at Azad Maidan ground to protest against the alleged atrocities on Muslims in Assam and Myanmar.
There is no doubt about the authenticity of the photograph, which was widely published in mainstream media in August 2012. Boom Live had only fact-checked the use of the authentic photograph for an unrelated event in 2019 by some social media users. They didn’t say that the photo is fake as Instagram is saying now, they only said the claims made in relation to the photo was fake.
Azad Maidan Riots
On 11 August 2012, the Muslim organisations led by Raza Academy staged a morcha at Azad Maidan ground to protest against the alleged atrocities on Muslims in Assam and Myanmar. The protest was staged by Muslim organisations in Azad Maidan to condemn the Rakhine riots and Assam riots, which later turned into a riot.
To condemn the Assam and Rakhine riots, Raza Academy organized a protest rally. However, the protest turned violent after one of the notorious groups attacked the policemen leading to police firing in which two persons were killed and 63 persons including 58 policemen were injured.
Raza Academy which had organized the protest had earlier assured the Mumbai Police that only 1500 people would turn up. However, more than 15000 people assembled at the Azad Maidan and later the crowd swelled to over 40000 people resulting in Muslim mobs unleashing violence on the streets of Mumbai.
The most shocking incident of the Azad Maidan Riots was the desecration of Amar Jawan Jyoti memorial by the Muslim mobs. The war memorial is dedicated to the fighters of 1857 – the First Indian Freedom Struggle.
Meta-platforms’ biases
However, it is not surprising that Meta-owned Instagram reacted so quickly and arbitrarily to a post showing violence by a Muslim youth, given that Meta platforms, like Facebook, are openly biased towards left-liberals and Islamists.
What more evidence is needed than the fact that Meta-owned Instagram did not consider Hindu Genocide to be a crime?
Like Instagram, Facebook had also blocked Hunter Biden’s laptop story, which was admitted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook had also blocked the media reports about multi-million dollar real estate purchases by BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors. The self-described Marxist was criticised on social media for purchasing four luxury houses valued at $3.4 million in the U.S., but Facebook censored those criticisms and also censored reports about the purchase in New York Post and the Daily Mail.
When TMC workers went on a rampage after winning the 2021 West Bengal elections, Facebook blocked users who had posted about the rape and torture of women by TMC goons for supporting the BJP.
OpIndia also has been a victim of Facebook’s censorship, as the social media giant had curtailed the reach of the page of our portal.