Sorry, are you trying to promote rationalism and secular humanism in India, you may be unsafe for Facebook.

The Facebook page Indian Atheists is an initiative by the Nirmukta community. Our mission is to bring together a community of Indian Atheists and to build a society based on science, reason and humanistic values.Yesterday we found that content from this page could not be shared as it has been flagged as unsafe. Facebook policies are such that, in case of an objectionable content, the said post would be removed by Facebook. But we found that no specific post was removed or flagged as objectionable. Instead the entire Indian Atheists page has been flagged as unsafe and we are not able to share our posts or even tag Indian Atheists in any post or even in closed groups.





People trying to tag the page got this message:



Many of our members have informed Facebook that our page follows Facebook guidelines and that the ban is unwarranted by using the “let us know” button. But so far we have received no response.

It is not that the Indian Atheists page has never faced problems. We keep getting threats from haters in the form of messages. We have always heard of atheist pages being easily blocked on Facebook because of “hurting religious sentiments” and given the hostile environment in India, have always tried to keep within the limits set by Facebook. But we are not sure of the reason for the ban.

We keep surmising about the possible reasons. Was it our stance against Hindutva, or posts against endorsement of homeopathy and other “alternate medicines” issued by Delhi government in Delhi metro? Was it our articles on the mid-brain activation scam, that plagues our country, have upset a lot of practitioners of the scam? Or was it the article that talked about beef eating practices in ancient India and criticised the banning of beef in some states? Recently we have also been posting frequently against the derecognition of the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle in IIT Madras which could have offended the religious and caste apologists. We are left wondering which of our reason-based humanistic posts has offended the sensibilities of bigots and reactionaries.

We the humanists are offended by this gagging of our page and we react to this in a humanistic manner. The voice of reason cannot be stifled for long. And when we regain our voice be rest assured we will speak even more loudly the language of reason and humanism. So long!

Update (Jun-9-2015):

The same way Indian Atheists was restricted, it has been unblocked without any official statement from Facebook. We were neither notified about the blocking, nor the unblocking.

We are now able to share any post from the page without facing any restriction. We wish to thank all members, fans and well wishers who raised their voice enough. It wouldn’t have been possible without you. We cannot emphasize this enough.

We will continue to promote science, secular humanism and freethought on the page and our groups.