The founder of Facebook stepped in to reverse the decision of his network to remove a post by a Pakistani actor that compared ridiculing Islam to called a black person a n***** or describing Hitler as ‘the messiah’.
Hamza Ali Abbasi was told that his post, which related to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, violated the social networking website’s ‘community standards’ and was removed and had his profile deactivated – but Mark Zuckerberg intervened.
When asked by a user what he thought about the deletion of Mr Abbasi’s post, Mr Zuckerberg said that a mistake may have been made, and alerted his company’s Vice President of Global Operations and Media Partnerships, Justin Osofsky, to the matter.
He said: ‘I don’t think this should have been blocked. Our team might have made a mistake. Justin, can you look into this?’
Mr Abbasi, who is very vocal on political issues, posted a message last week in which he questioned the west’s definition of freedom of expression in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack by two jihadists in Paris.
He wrote: ‘A French Muslim police officer dies doing his duty in the face of two mislead Muslim youth killing falsely in the name of the religion of peace, Islam. Yes, even my blood boils when someone insults my Prophet… But that does not give individuals the right to kill.
‘But west needs to understand too that freedom of expression includes criticism, disagreement or even rejection of faiths or ideology… but should not and must not allow ‘insult’. Would it be ‘freedom of expression’ if I branded black people as n****** or if I say Hitler was a messiah?’
He added: ‘The West needs to rethink and fix its definition of “freedom of expression”.’
Mr Abbasi revealed that his account was subsequently blocked.
He told Dawn.com: ‘I had been trying to log into my Facebook for a couple of hours and it wasn’t accepting the password. I genuinely thought it had been hacked but then I got an email from Facebook saying that my account had been temporarily blocked and my status had been deleted and this was the first of three warnings. That really made me angry so I took the screen grab and posted it as soon as I had access to my account.’
He added: ‘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.’
Mr Osofsky later posted an apology and said he hoped Mr Abbasi would re-post his comment.
He wrote: ‘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.’
The spat follows Mark Zuckerberg recounting a 2010 incident he had with a Pakistani extremist, who demanded that he be put to death for allowing insults about Islam to appear on Facebook.
Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook: ‘A few years ago, an extremist in Pakistan fought to have me sentenced to death because Facebook refused to ban content about Mohammed that offended him.’
It was a result of the site’s promotion of an Everybody Draw Mohammed Day which took place on May 20 of that year.
And while he did not end up being charged with any crime or sentenced to death, the Pakistani government did block Facebook in their country.