Srinagar, May 03 (KNB): Today when whole world is celebrating Press Freedom Day and the demands are made for professional journalism, free from political and commercial influence, the social media networking giant Facebook Inc continues to block news portals in Kashmir known for reporting the unbiased news and accurate reporting among them kashmirnewsbureau[dot]com, onlykashmir[dot]in, jandkheadlines[dot]com and others.
On pretext of “violation of community standards” the Facebook has blocked as many as 5 to 6 prominent news portals of Kashmir. Your message couldn’t be sent because it includes content that other people on Facebook have reported as abusive,” reads the dialogue box whenever a user tries to share story from these websites.
“We had been sharing news and opinions from our website on Facebook on a daily basis for more than a decade now, suddenly after post abrogation of Article 370 when internet was restored we realized that Facebook had shadow-banned our website. We were even using the ads manager, promoting our posts for more than a decade and still, today we received the infamous eye-watering message from Facebook, we are sure we were 100% certain that our website was not violating any “community standards” but still, every effort returned the same message as above,” stated Bilal Bashir Bhat Editor Onlykashmir[dot]in.
“Not only the Url has been blocked my personal account and the accounts who are admin of the official pages of our website are also blocked by the Facebook this is utterly sort of a dictatorship and censorship as well by the Facebook,” said Mehraj ul Rehman Editor JandK Headlines who had some 9million likes on Facebook.
Sumeed Malik, Senior News Editor Kashmir News Bureau stated that we all news portals have decided to file an online petition wherein Facebook would be asked to remove such unjustified bans for the sake of Freedom of Press, adding, Facebook has no right to ban online activities without assessing any reason.(KNB)
Facebook continues to block Kashmir based News portals
