Facebook is well known for its passivity when it comes to banning the Islamophobia industry and, on the other hand, its proactive measures censoring orthodox Islamic voices.
RELATED: Are Facebook and Youtube Blocking Orthodox Muslim Content?
In this context, let’s analyze one Islamophobic industry that Facebook allows to thrive: The democratic Hindu nationalist government.
Vinay Sitapati, an Indian political scientist, writes for the Foreign Affairs:
The leak in October of internal documents from the technology giant Facebook has revealed damning details about the company’s practices. The firm, which recently rebranded as Meta, was aware of but ignored the harmful consequences of its social media platforms around the world. Facebook employees were especially alarmed by developments in India, which makes up its single largest market with 340 million users. The memos show that Facebook knew its pages were being used to peddle misinformation and target India’s 172 million Muslims with hate speech and depictions of violence. Facebook’s algorithms steered this content to users even as its monitoring mechanisms failed; it has artificial intelligence algorithms capable of screening content in only five of India’s 22 official languages. The nearly trillion-dollar company chose to do precious little, blaming scanty resources.
So, basically, Facebook, for what we can see are purely financial reasons (India being its single largest market), let Hindu nationalists express their “freedom of speech” by demonizing the Muslims of India.
Imagine if Muslims had khilafa, i.e., a unitary Islamic State, with such demographic weight and socio-economic influence that could influence the global market and the policies of social media and allowing Muslims to speak freely. Alas, we have to make without, for the time being.
Of course, this liberal censorship game also applies to other social media platforms, such as YouTube.
RELATED: YouTube Censors Genius of Islam: Ep. 3 – Can You Help?
The rest of the Foreign Affairs article is mainly India-centric, but the author also brings an acute observation on the “modernization theory,” which also applies to the Muslim world:
Techno-utopians imagined that access to the Internet would free individuals from the constraining bonds of society, encouraging new self-definitions and habits of reasoned debate. This dream—a digital avatar of the once popular “modernization theory” that imagined that all societies could develop on roughly linear trajectories toward a version of liberal Western modernity—has proven wishful in most places, but in the Indian context it is a hallucination.
Yes, the entire world will follow the West in developing their own dystopias of modernity. The delusions of liberal secularists are amusing.
Few other lines from the conclusion which concern us Muslims as well:
Millions of ordinary Indians have harnessed the tools of Western modernity, but they are uninterested in being transformed by it.
A clear admission that the goal of modernity is to transform human beings into the vision of humanity advocated by liberal secularists. But the transformation process in India and elsewhere is seemingly not as fast as Westerners would like.
RELATED: Why Are So Many Far-Right Extremists Converting to Islam?
Overall, Islam is unique when it comes to opposing the liberalization agenda, so much so that it has to be censored by these companies. Meanwhile, seething Hindu nationalists and Zionists are given a free pass.
RELATED: Why Muslims Should Be Concerned By the Metaverse
Parents and grown-ups should vet new platforms and their owners (ideology, religious affiliation, opinion on LGBT, other biases, etc.) before letting their kids use them, or before recommending them to their friends and family. If people had known how bad Faceberg was, FB wouldn’t have been so famous today. Platforms like FB are manipulative, targeted political messages can already be seen out there. We shouldn’t be naive.
It shouldn’t be taboo to say that people’s ideologies, religious affiliations, opinions on LGBT, etc. define their morality and are very important factors when deciding who to and who to not deal with. It sure is polarizing, but it also promotes diversity of thought and ideas that can otherwise not exist in today’s cancel culture.