New Delhi: In 2019, Equality Labs, an advocacy group that focuses on technology and human rights, with a team of 20 international researchers – that included Dalits, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and others – systematically recorded 1,000 Facebook posts that they found to be in violation of the platform’s community standards.
Their findings displayed that over 40% of all the posts that were removed after the group reported them were restored after a period of 90 days on average. An overwhelming majority of the posts that were restored were Islamophobic in nature.
The report summarises Equality Labs’ advocacy concerning hate speech on Facebook during 2018 and reveals disturbingly real threats that Facebook content presents to an estimated 300 million Indian caste, religious, gender, and queer minorities both in India and abroad.
Keeping their own experiences battling hate and the Equality Labs report in mind, Rohingya refugees have filed a Public Interest Petition (PIL) under Article 226 of the Indian Constitution, invoking Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, on behalf of the Rohingya community in India seeking protection of the right to life as members of their community in Delhi and throughout the country face violence, sometimes escalating to physical threats, as a result of the dissemination of violent hate remarks targeting them on the basis of their ethnicity and religion on Facebook.
The petitioners of the PIL are Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar due to ethnic violence and have been residing in New Delhi for the past 2 to 5 years and have been issued valid identity cards by the UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency, which recognises the petitioners’ community as a persecuted community. The Rohingya people are a Muslim minority from the Rakhine state of Myanmar.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here .
