By- Pratik Sinha FREE

 

Rajiv Tyagi has been blocked by Facebook for a month. This is his second one month ban in recent times. Both bans have been for the most frivolous reasons. This time he’s been banned for copy-pasting the following post of Vinod Chand on to his timeline.

(https://www.facebook.com/vinod.k.chand/posts/10211543619690164)

The perennially butt-hurt bhakts probably mass reported the post and Facebook banned him based on their ‘community standards’, an act which as usual defies all logic.

Here’s what Rajiv Tyagi wrote in an email to Carson Dalton (https://twitter.com/carsondalton) who works with Facebook.

“Dear Mr. Dalton,

I’m an erstwhile Indian Air Force combat pilot and a civil rights activist.

In the current political scenario in India, where a fascist polity is attempting to make inroads into an essentially liberal society, it is important for spokespersons of the liberal space to instigate discussion and opinion against the spread of communal hatred in society.

Strangely though, the ‘community standards’ of the most widely used social media platform in the world, Facebook, seem loaded against the liberal, who is actually spending personal time, energy and passion, fighting the very things civilized society decries – hatred, communal polarization and criminal intimidation of those that do not subscribe to another’s opinion!

I do not know how your complaint system works, but swarms of complainants seem to be able to suppress the very voices that seek to infuse sanity into a communally polarized society. And outright hateful speech, no parent would want their child to read, passes muster; probably because the liberal does not complain even of hate speech! If you have humans evaluating such complaints, I wonder if they need to be sensitized to the real needs of a world so easily motivated by hatred and so slow to understand what is going wrong with all of us.

I am convinced Facebook has blocked not only me unfairly, for sharing a post that is so important to pass on. It has also blocked the entire Indian liberal space from interacting with each other over the purveyance of hatred, through the propagation of medieval social mores.

Please unblock me. I do not spread hatred; I fight the spread of hatred across Indian society. A cursory stroll through my timeline will convince you of my motivations and intent…

Sincerely,
Rajiv Tyagi”

Please share this widely, we have to stand up for each other during such times.