Afghanistan: Facebook ‘proactively’ removing Taliban content; WhatsApp seeks to block group
- The Taliban is on Facebook’s list of dangerous organisations and therefore any content promoting or representing it is banned, an executive says
- The group uses social media to mobilise support and the decisions of tech firms will have a ‘direct impact’ those under the Taliban’s rule, an analyst says
The Taliban is on the company’s list of dangerous organisations and therefore any content promoting or representing the group is banned, said Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s photo-sharing app Instagram.
“We are relying on that policy to proactively take down anything that we can that might be dangerous or that is related to the Taliban in general,” Mosseri said during a Bloomberg Television interview on Monday.
“Now this situation is evolving rapidly, and with it I’m sure the risk will evolve as well,” he said. “We are going to have to modify what we do and how we do it to respond to those changing risks as they happen.”
The Taliban uses social media to mobilise support, said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and co-author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.
“The decisions that are made by Facebook and Twitter in the next couple of days will have a direct impact on the lives on the many people who find themselves under the Taliban’s rule,” Brooking said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
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