Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan has written a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighting the hate content being spread against Islam on the world¡¯s largest social media platform.?
In the letter, Khan seeks a ban on the spread of such Islamophobic content through Facebook and its subsidiaries.
The letter has been shared by the Pakistani government on Twitter. In the letter, Imran Khan mentions that ¡°growing Islamophobia¡± is giving rise to hate, extremism and violence across the world. He points out that the spread of Islamophobia is being especially enabled through social media platforms such as Facebook.
¡°I would ask you to place a similar ban on Islamophobia and hate against Islam for Facebook that you have put in place for the Holocaust,¡± Khan said in his letter to Zuckerberg. This was in reference to the recent update by Facebook in its hate speech policy against any content that denied or distorted the Holocaust.
Facebook did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Khan¡¯s letter by Reuters.
¡°One cannot send a message that while hate messages against some are unacceptable, these are acceptable against others,¡± Khan said in his letter. He further added that this was ¡°reflective of prejudice and bias that will encourage further radicalisation¡±.
?The letter comes as a response to the situation in France where a growing unrest associates Islam with terrorism. The unrest has been spun by the beheading of a French history teacher by an Islamist radical who wanted to avenge the use of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad in a class on freedom of expression.
Wielding a large knife, the convict attacked the teacher in a street in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in France, cutting off his head. The attacker was then shot dead about 600 metres from the scene, as per news reports.