

For over a month now, people of Kashmir have been without mobile communication services and internet access. The death of Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani in Kashmir sparked massive unrest in the state and now even censorship seems to be knocking on the Valley's doors.

For three straight days, even daily newspapers were stopped from being circulated and now, even Facebook's Kashmir-related posts and updates are being apparently 'censored'.

After Wani's death, Facebook censored dozens of posts and user accounts were either banned or temporarily rendered inactive.

A group of academics, journalists and activists took the matter to the social media giant, expressing their takes on Kashmir, using freedom of speech and expression, and many expressed their concerns regarding the censorship of Kashmir-related posts on Facebook.



"The entire experience has generated anxiety and a feeling of being bullied," Dibyesh Anand told The Wire. He is a professor of international relations at the University of Westminster, whose account was blocked for two days over the last two weeks.

"FB and its arbitrary censorship. These are deliberate to engender confusion, self-censorship and anxieties."

"An anti rape image that is used by Human Rights Watch, Outlook, LRB, academic articles, activists and many others is represented by FB as nudity."

"I was chatting on FB messenger with a friend when I was suddenly logged out. When I tried to log back in, it said my account had been disabled. I was shocked of course, but tried to remain calm and send Facebook my proof of identity as requested," Parrey told The Wire.

Arif Ayaz Parrey's account was completely disabled. He is a senior sub-editor at Centre for Science and Environment. This happened three times over the last four days.

"When I contacted FB, they restored mine but send a message that Kashmir Solidarity Network (KSN) has been removed."



"First they removed profiles and now they have started to remove pages and repositories."

The above post is no longer available and it all happened as we were writing the story. We took the screenshot of the aforementioned post that is not available anymore.

Kashmiris are of the view that this information blackout has now been taken to the next level by censoring Kashmir-related updates on Facebook.

Facebook clarifies their technical errors and mistakes after people question them on reasons behind the blocking and censorship.

"There are no papers and we only get two TV news channels," said Zargar Yasir. He is a Kashmiri blogger and PhD student who told The Guardian that his account was blocked for more than a week, and some posts removed, after he linked to a self-authored blog-post about Burhan Wani.

"When there's no news, usually we turn to social media for information. That way at least we can talk to each other, we can ask our families and friends how they are, if they are OK. But Facebook has taken my account down, so how do I do that now?" Yasir said.



The Guardian quoted Facebook as saying:

"There is no place on Facebook for content that praises or supports terrorists, terrorists organisations or terrorism. We welcome discussion on these subjects but any terrorist content has to be clearly put in context which condemns these organisations and or their violent activities. Therefore, profiles and content supporting or praising Hizbul Mujahideen and Burhan Wani are removed as soon as they are reported to us. In this instance, some content was removed in error, but this has now been restored."