Facebook on Sunday evening restored the page of Kisan Ekta Morcha that has been sharing updates on the farmers’ protest against the Centre’s farm laws after having deleted it a few hours earlier. It was not immedately clear for how long the page had been taken taken.
The account — called ‘Kisan Ekta Morcha’ — has over 100,000 followers and identifies itself as the official platform of the Kisan Andolan. It regularly publishes updates on the protests, videos of speeches given by farmer union leaders and also counters what it claims is misinformation by the Centre.
“We were live and we got a notification that the page is unpublished and that was very strange… We didn’t get any warning,” Baljeet Singh Sandhu, IT Cell head and vice-president of the Majha Kisan committee, told The Wire.
The page was unpublished at around 7:00 PM and was accessible again by 9:30 PM, during which several hundreds of users accused Facebook of censoring farmer voices.
At the time, a screenshot tweeted by the farmer’s group showed that the page had been removed due to “community standards on spam”
This is what they can do when people raise their voices…….
When they can’t beat us ideologically…….#DigitalKisan #SuppressingTheVoiceOfDissent pic.twitter.com/foK6k5zzM3
— Kisan Ekta Morcha (@Kisanektamorcha) December 20, 2020
Activist Yogendra Yadav said on Twitter that he had been doing a Facebook Live video transmission from the Kisan Ekta Morcha page, when the group got a notification that the page had been unpublished.
“The action taken by Facebook to close the Kisan Ekta Morcha requires a close look at its content moderation practices and polices. India has close to 300 million Facebook users. It’s largest market. Even then there is little transparency or accountability,” the Internet Freedom Foundation, a New Delhi-based digital rights organisation, said in a statement.
“As an immediate ask and at the very least Facebook is expected to issue a detailed statement on how and why was the page of Kisan Ekta Manch unpublished. Second, it needs to provide a public commitment for a transparent human rights review as provided in the United States.”