New Delhi, March 27: After mentioning Kashmir separately along with India and a few other countries in a blog post, Facebook Wednesday apologized for the “mistake”.
Reacting to an IANS story that said that Kashmir had been mentioned separately along with India in a violation of the country’s territorial integrity, Facebook deleted the reference to Kashmir from the blog post. “We mistakenly included ‘Kashmir’ in our blog post when listing the countries and regions impacted by the Iranian network we disrupted for coordinated inauthentic behaviour,” Facebook told IANS in a statement.
“Kashmir was the subject of some of the content shared by this network, but it should not have been included in that list. We have corrected this in the blog post and we apologize for any confusion caused,” the statement added. Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, who had written the original blog post, also tweeted.
“It was a mistake. Kashmir was a topic of some of the posts, but shouldn’t have been in the list of impacted countries and regions. We’ve corrected — apologies for the confusion.”
In his blog post Tuesday, Gleicher mentioned Kashmir as a separate entity from India as Facebook announced that it removed thousands of fake Pages and accounts. Jammu and Kashmir is an Indian state and New Delhi views delinking it from India as a violation of its territorial integrity.
“Today, we removed 513 Pages, Groups and accounts for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behaviour as part of multiple networks tied to Iran,” said Gleicher. “They operated in Egypt, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Kashmir, Kazakhstan or broadly across the Middle East and North Africa,” he added.
Facebook reportedly has over 300 million users in India, the highest in the world. Some of the axed Pages and accounts posted news stories on Indian politics as well as on the tension between India and Pakistan.
“They posted news stories on current events and frequently repurposed and amplified content from Iranian state media about topics including sanctions against Iran; tensions between India and Pakistan; conflicts in Syria and Yemen; terrorism; tensions between Israel and Palestine; Islamic religious issues; Indian politics; and the recent crisis in Venezuela,” the blog post noted. Facebook said it removed a total of 2,632 Pages, Groups and accounts that were engaged in coordinated inauthentic behaviour from Iran, Russia, Macedonia and Kosovo on its platform, as well as on Instagram. With social media becoming a hotbed of politics, the Election Commission is keeping a close watch on how these platforms are being used by political parties and their affiliates.
The Election Commission earlier this month directed the social media giant to delete two posts shared by a Bharatiya Janata Party MLA with Indian Air Force Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman’s image.