Slashdot Mirror
Pakistan Lifts Ban After Facebook Deletes Offending Page
crimeandpunishment writes "Facebook is back in Pakistan today. A day after Bangladesh banned the social networking site, the Pakistani government lifted its ban after officials from Facebook apologized for the 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day' page and removed it from the site. The page caused outrage and protests among Pakistan's Muslim population, and led to the ban two weeks ago. A spokesman for Pakistan's office of information technology said Facebook assured the government 'nothing of this sort will happen in the future.'"
There were a lot of submissions, and Muhammad had taken an unimaginable amount of forms. Although, quite a few took the oppurtunity to show their hatred towards muslims in general (nukes at the Kaba etc.), which made the impact of the images sort of embarrasing after a while. Another trend also occured, namely death threats. They seemed to flourish, judging by the amount of print screens that were posted. I think they actually ended up making a seperate death threat gallery. In my oppionion that just makes this caving even worse. Yet another victory for the unevolved.
When in hell, pray for rain
Facebook is a company, not the government. So whatever the constitution says about free speech is irrelevant.
Well, except on May 24th the creators of the "Everybody Draw Mohammad" page deleted it themselves. Note that although the Slashdot summary says Facebook deleted it, the actual article only quotes FB as saying "The page has been removed" without ever declaring that they did so themselves. The stated reason is it became a 24/7 job to delete the endless flood of people calling for genocide against the muslims, and people posting gay porn of Obama and Muhammad (roughly 90% of the image submissions), or posting Muslims being disemboweled by assorted Aryan Americans. (I'm sure they were also tired of doing the converse). Naturally, pulling the page caused those same people to turn their hatred on the creators, calling them secret Muslim terrorists, and expressing murderous outrage that they ever dared to censor in the first place.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I was a member of the group, and I hadn't looked at it a week or so. Last I saw though, the admins were saying they were going to voluntarily take the site down because they had made their point and that it was too time consuming to keep up with cleaning up the posts/links/porn people were posting to the page. Some folks offered to take over admin so that the page wouldn't be destroyed. I never checked back to see what happened.
Personally, I'd like to see the apology to Pakistan from facebook, because it sounds a little too good to be true.
P.S. The first time the page was removed was May 20th, 2010. Here's the wall quotes from a group admin from May 22th, 2010:
"This page was removed two days ago, after one of our moderators had his email and skype hacked. His personal data was revealed. He then got scared and deleted the page, the blog and the emails. The rest of us, are now back without him after he backed out. This is another scare tactic from the Islamic extremists. We won't fall. Pictures you were unable to post on the 20th? Check the forums for interviews." "A great big thank you to the facebook-gang for restoring the page. A great big thank you to all freedom lovers out there. Now we have new persons to handle the media and we will soon release some info about the past few days. And to all of you: One can never beat freedom of speech, opinion and idividuality, because they are all basic human rights."
I'd be more in favour of the US Government blocking those who do not understand what their right to free speech is, so that we are not bothered with the thoughts of those who haven't a clue.
Right to free speech in the United States is as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. This says that the government cannot limit freedom of expression. Facebook is not the government. Facebook can decide what it will permit people to say on its website and what it will not. The right to free speech does not extend to obliging others to promote your opinions. There is no free speech violation here.
I agree with you on that but it's during these times that Muslims least want to be identified as such. Muslims watch the same news you do and we have a pretty good idea what's going through the average person's mind. And it's not your fault either, that's the admission: if I was not a Muslim I'd be pretty mad at Muslims too (in fact even as a Muslim I'm fairly annoyed).
And so the moderates are kind of, I feel from personal experience, in limbo. Now is the worst possible time I can imagine to have to admit being even remotely associated with people I deeply disagree with and, in fact, have very little in common with.
It's really a weird spot to be in. They're a half a world away, I disagree with them (and honestly kind of dislike them), but somehow I need to dissociate myself from them.
It's an unenviable position to be in for any reasonable person, Muslim or not. All reasonable dialogue is drowned out by shouts of exclusion from both sides. The best time to talk is usually after the full-throated yelling has ended, and is best demonstrated by actions rather than words.
These things really set back that long term, grassroots dialogue back. Depressing.
Youre right that its offensive, and youre right that we arent really loosing rights... but NOT for the reason you gave. We havent lost a right because Facebook is a private enterprise and we are free to not use it if this offends us. You seem to be implying that, for example, it would be OK to have a law mandating the death penalty for being offensive; I disagree.
Im not sure you are aware of this, but burning a US flag is protected speech. If you were lynched in your example, there would be a murder investigation; it is certainly NOT ok to lynch people for what you described.