CEO and co-founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg on Monday termed the removal of Pakistani actor Hamza Ali Abbasi’s status on the Charlie Hebdo attack; containing internationally objectionable terms, as a ‘mistake.’
Hamza Ali Abbasi’s status was removed from Faceboook following a notification which said that his post doesn’t follow the policy standards.
Responding to a question, asked by a Facebook user Angelic Munni about deletion of Hamza’s post, Mark Zuckerberg responded “I don’t think this should have been blocked. Our team might have made a mistake.”
Advancing further, Zuckerberg tagged Justin Osofsky who is the Vice President of Global Operations and Media Partnerships for Facebook and asked him to look into the matter.
Later on, Osofsky apologized and commented “As Mark mentioned, we made a mistake in taking this down. We try to do our best, but sometimes make mistakes. We apologize for this error, and hope that the author will re-post it as we are not able to restore it from our end. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”
One day earlier, Hamza Ali Abbasi claimed that Facebook authorities deactivated his profile and removed his status in which he had condemned the killings at the Parisian office of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
INCITEMENT TO VIOLENCE?
Condemning the killings at Paris’ Charlie Hebdo office last week, the actor had said, “the West needs to rethink and fix its definition of ‘freedom of expression’ otherwise someone from almost 2 billion of us Muslims will go ballistic and kill unjustly.”
Hamza also posted a screenshot of the deleted post on Sunday along with Facebook’s notification that followed the removal of the comment with an excuse that the post doesn’t not follow “Community Standards” of social networking website.
While he garnered support from his fans, many thought the actor’s post delivered a threat and may be the reason behind the status removal. The star had also compared ridiculing Islam to call a black person a ‘nigger’ or describing Hitler as ‘the messiah’.
Later on, talking to media Abbasi said “I post so many controversial things on my Facebook, I believe in voicing my opinion. It’s just funny that their selective freedom of speech caused them to delete only this particular post of all things.”
On learning that Mark Zuckerberg had responded and called it a mistake, he said, “I’m glad that it has gotten back to him and that it’s brought attention to exactly what I was trying to convey in my post?”
The incident comes just days after Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed on the company’s commitment to freedom of speech, and pointed out that “extremists in Pakistan had tried him sentence to death” for refusing to prohibit content about Prophet Muhammad (Peace be Upon Him). In the January 9 post, he had said, “I won’t let that happen on Facebook. I’m committed to building a service where you can speak freely without fear of violence.”
