Should the Taliban be banned?
If one found the decision of Social Media companies of banning the former US President Donald Trump problematic, it is nothing compared to the devastating web presence of the Taliban.
When the Taliban were in power in the state of Afghanistan back from 1996 to 2001, only one per cent of the 1-10thpopulation of the state was present on Internet, as per the reports of the World Bank.
Thus, this is going to be the very first time when social media has to decide whether the platforms will allow the Taliban to post content on social media when it has resumed its role.
Where does social media stand?
- YouTube & Facebook decided on banning the Taliban because it being a Terrorist Organization. The latter even prohibits any support or representation of the mentioned Terrorist Organization from other accounts.
- Whereas, Twitter in this case has decided to ban only the posts that are glorifying violence, manipulating platforms & posting content considered as spam.
Now the social media will be deciding if they want to update their policies or work on their quick enforcement, as the mentioned organization has become much more active recently. According to the reports of NYT, more than a hundred accounts and pages on Facebook, as well as Twitter supporting the organization or the terrorist group, have come up since the 9th of August, 2021.
These newly emerged accounts work collaboratively, which means when one account posts something the other will be joining it.
But is deciding on cracking down easy?
Posters of Taliban are evading the current policy of content, like making slight changes to the hashtags or changing the keywords which moderators generally make a search for or even with the use of a newly made account after one gets shut down.
So the content that the Taliban post or the ones that are sponsored by them are going to slip in via cracks. Lastly, Facebook has said that it has brought a team comprising experts who will help in sifting through the posts.
The issue of whether the Taliban should be taking over the official accounts of the government of Afghanistan on social media will be getting even worse.