Facebook on Wednesday temporarily hid several posts that included the tag #ResignModi. The social networking giant restored them within a few hours and called it a “mistake”.
“We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it,” a Facebook Inc spokesperson said.
Facebook blocked several posts that tagged #ResignModi. They also sent a message to users that read: “Posts with #ResignModi are temporarily hidden here. Some content in those posts goes against our community standards.”
Soon after, Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson replied to NBCNews editor Olivia Solon’s tweet and wrote: “This hashtag has been restored and we are looking into what happened.”
As soon as #ResignModi was restored, it started trending once again with over 15,000 posts on Facebook.
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In August 2020, The Wall Street Journal had written about Facebook India’s public policy head Aankhi Das’ longstanding support for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, that was visible from her social media posts during the party’s 2014 win. According to some employees in the company, this was contradictory to the company’s policy of staying neutral during elections in the world.
As India battles the deadly second wave of Covid-19 since March, thousands of people have been dying due to lack of oxygen supply in hospitals. There have been an acute shortage of beds, with people dying due to the lack of it. Many celebrities and the general public are using social media platforms to criticise the government’s failure of handling the situation.
While people have been seeking SOS emergencies through social media platform for oxygen cylinders, hospital beds, medicines, crematorium and burial grounds, the Central government had recently directed Twitter to delete several tweets which criticised the Centre for the mismanagement of the second wave of Covid-19.
Twitter has deleted over 50 posts since April 24 including tweets by Congress’ national spokesperson Pawan Khera, West Bengal labour and law Minister Moloy Ghatak, filmmakers Avinash Das and Vinod Kapri, actor Vineet Kumar Singh, Member of Parliament Revanth Reddy, journalist Pieter Friedrich, Congress MP Anumula Revanth Reddy, Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Vickram Chaturvedi, and several others.
FB India is currently censoring posts calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister https://t.co/1PZjB5Q3Nm
— Olivia Solon (@oliviasolon) April 28, 2021
With 1,06,105 new positive cases of Covid-19, India recorded 30,84,814 active cases as of Thursday with 3,645 deaths, according to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare data.