Facebook Blocks #ResignModi Posts for Hours as India Crisis Grows
Vlad Savov, Bloomberg News People wait at an entry gate of a Covid-19 vaccination center at the Goregaon NESCO jumbo Covid centre in the Goregaon suburb of Mumbai, India, on Tuesday, April 27, 2021. India s spike in virus numbers has prompted state governments to impose movement curbs, which in turn have tamped down economic activity as well as stoked price pressures because of broken supply chains. , Bloomberg
(Bloomberg) Facebook Inc. blocked posts tagged #ResignModi before restoring them hours later, stoking a controversy thatâs erupted over government requests to remove social media content as India grapples with an escalating Covid crisis.
Facebook said it barred the hashtag by mistake and not at the behest of the government, without elaborating. Facebook periodically blocks hashtags for a variety of reasons, some manually but many also based on automated internal guidelines. The error stemmed from content associated with the label and not the hashtag itself, the spokesperson added.
The hours-long block, which came ahead of the final phase of lawmaker elections in a key state and effectively wiped posts calling on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to resign, follows public outrage and official efforts to curb content critical of the way his government has handled the pandemic. This year, the country established new rules that require the likes of Facebook and Twitter Inc. to take down unlawful content quicker, triggering a debate over freedom of speech in the world’s largest democracy.
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April 29 2021, 5:17 PM
(Bloomberg)
(Bloomberg)
Facebook Inc. blocked posts tagged #ResignModi before restoring them hours later, stoking a controversy thatâs erupted over government requests to remove social media content as India grapples with an escalating Covid crisis.
Facebook said it barred the hashtag by mistake and not at the behest of the government, without elaborating. Facebook periodically blocks hashtags for a variety of reasons, some manually but many also based on automated internal guidelines. The error stemmed from content associated with the label and not the hashtag itself, the spokesperson added.
The hours-long block, which came ahead of the final phase of lawmaker elections in a key state and effectively wiped posts calling on Prime Minister Narendra Modi to resign, follows public outrage and official efforts to curb content critical of the way his government has handled the pandemic. This year, the cou