On a Facebook post, company founder Mark Zuckerberg has shared his thoughts about the recent attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and has also tackled discourse about freedom of speech.
Although the post has received a lot of likes, not many shared the same sentiment with the Facebook founder, especially those whose posts and pages were banned due to alleged violation Facebook's Community Standards.
Zuckerberg's post said "Facebook has always been a place where people across the world share their views and ideas. We follow the laws in each country, but we never let one country or group of people dictate what people can share across the world."
Many claimed that Facebook might be violating its very own rules and guidelines. Facebook users from all over the globe complained that their respective pages, posts and even groups were forcibly deleted even though they have not violated any of Facebook's rules.
Many of the banned Facebook pages contain hate speech, threats and harassment, but according to some, Facebook's approach to freedom of speech might still be a bit blurry especially when it comes to government requests.
Based on Facebook's transparency report, the company has forcibly removed 1,773 different contents in Pakistan and that is only for the first half of 2014. The next biggest banning incident happened to India with over 4,960 banned contents and Turkey with 1,893.
Facebook has yet to comment about this but has continued its stand that the removed contents due to government requests has gone through and complied with "thorough legal analysis".
A recent report, however, shows that majority of the removed contents were explicitly offensive, most of which were references to Hitler and the Holocaust along with various immoral racial comments, anti-gay sentiments and blatant prejudice to a certain groups views and ideas.