Meta bans largest Muslim news page in India

Meta has banned the largest Muslim news page on Instagram in India at the behest of the government.

Muslim, a news account run by Palestinian American journalist Ameer Al-Khatahtbeh, is one of the most-followed Muslim news sources on Instagram. Videos on Al-Khatahtbeh’s account have amassed more than 866 million views and the account is a crucial news source for Muslims around the world. It offers up to the minute news and information about stories affecting the Muslim community, often featuring stories that the Western media ignores.

On Tuesday, the page was removed in India and users attempting to view posts by @Muslim within the country were met with a message that read: “Account not available in India. This is because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content.”

 

 

India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, and until the account was banned, Al-Khatahtbeh’s largest audience was in India. Millions of users in India followed @Muslim, and when the page went down they began flooding the DMs of Al-Khatahtbeh’s personal account, begging for @Muslim to be reinstated.

“I’m worried about news not being received in these parts of the world,” Al-Khatahtbeh said of the ban. “Muslim exists because the stories we tell aren’t given the light of day in the Western media. Especially in India, where Muslims are facing a lot of persecution. People rely on Muslim to tell them about the injustices happening in India against Muslims and to share these stories with the world.” Meta declined to comment.

“We strongly condemn India’s increasingly fascist government for demanding that Meta shut down the popular social media page Muslim, and we call on Meta to reverse its decision to surrender to this bigoted attack on free speech,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy director of the National Council on American-Islamic Relations. “By silencing @Muslim in India without any basis while it also carries out a mass censorship campaign for the Israeli government, Meta has once again stood on the side of human rights abusers. This must end.”

Al-Khatahtbeh said that he has been so preoccupied with Gaza coverage, that he has hardly had time to cover the escalating tensions between India and Pakistan that have reached a boiling point in recent weeks. When his account was banned, there were no recent posts about Pakistan or India anywhere on the page.

India conducted airstrikes on areas in Pakistan on Tuesday in retaliation for a terror attack by armed militants that killed more than two dozen civilians, including Hindu tourists in Kashmir two weeks ago. The attack was one of the worst attacks on civilians in decades and left 17 people injured and 26 dead. India immediately blamed Pakistan, without providing evidence. Pakistan has denied any involvement. The two countries have fought for years over Kashmir, a region that each claims is part of their respective countries.

In the wake of the attack, India has cracked down aggressively on online speech. On Tuesday, Indian authorities arrested Hilal Mir, a well known and respected journalist in Indian-administered Kashmir. Mir, who has multiple bylines in international outlets, was taken into custody and had his phone and laptop seized.

The Indian government also banned over a dozen Pakistani YouTube channels and restricted access to the social media accounts of major Pakistani public figures, citing the spread of “provocative” content.

Meta blocked the accounts of Bollywood movie stars including Fawad Khan and Atif Aslam in India, along with a slew of famous cricket players and social media influencers who posted “anti-national content.” Olympic gold medallist Arshad Nadeem, a Pakistani javelin thrower, also had his Instagram account blocked in India.

Though Al-Khatahtbeh wasn’t given information about what law his page violated, journalists and social media influencers have had their social media accounts restricted under Section 69A of the IT Act, which empowers the Indian government to block any information it likes from public access in the “interest of sovereignty and integrity of India.” Meta’s transparency center makes it clear that the company will comply with all local laws and takedown requests.

These crackdowns are part of a broader pattern of speech suppression in India, where journalists, especially from Muslim communities, face escalating risks for reporting on sensitive political issues. Meta, which has close ties to prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has worked hand in hand with the government to help censor speech in the region.

Last year, Meta approved political ads in India that incited violence against Muslims during an election period. The company approved ads containing slurs towards Muslims and calls to murder Muslims like “let’s burn this vermin” and “Hindu blood is spilling, these invaders must be burned.” The ads also included Hindu supremacist language and encouraged the execution of an opposition leader that the ads falsely claimed wanted to “erase Hindus from India,” next to an image of the Pakistan flag.

In 2023, India changed its laws to require social media platforms to rely on government-appointed fact-checking units for content related to political leaders and government, essentially granting the government veto power over information it didn’t like. Meta complied with the Indian government’s new rules in order to continue to operate in the country.

 

 

Meta’s close relationship to Modi’s BJP party has helped the government seize more power. In 2022, it was revealed that Meta charged the BJP lower rates for political advertisements compared to other competing political parties. This pricing advantage allowed the BJP to reach a broader audience more cost-effectively, giving it a significant edge during the election cycle.

Ankhi Das, Facebook’s former policy director for India and South and Central Asia who had close ties to the BJP, apologized in 2020 for sharing a post that called Muslims in India a “degenerate community”.

In 2020, Facebook executives including Das, initially declined to ban the account of Indian politician T. Raja Singh, for hate speech, despite the fact that he had violated the platform’s policies. According to the Wall Street Journal, Singh, a member of India’s BJP party, said that Rohingya Muslim refugees should be shot and called Indian Muslims traitors and threatened to demolish mosques. Only after weeks of uproar and media attention was Singh finally banned. Das later resigned after allegations that she interfered in Meta’s hate speech policy enforcement to show favoritism to BJP politicians.

Meta also delayed removing accounts spreading violent disinformation targeting journalists in Kashmir. In 2023, The Washington Post reported that, “Interviews with more than 20 current and former [Meta] employees and a review of newly obtained internal Facebook documents illustrate how executives repeatedly shied away from punishing the BJP or associated accounts.”

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Meta has shown a repeated willingness to partner with authoritarian governments to silence speech and journalism. In Singapore, where the company’s Asia operations are based, it agreed to attach a “correction notice” to news stories that the government declared false. In Vietnam, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company agreed to limit the reach of political speech determined to be illegal in exchange for the government ceasing its disruption of Facebook’s local servers.

Al-Khatahtbeh said that it’s difficult, as a journalist, to rely on platforms like Meta for distribution. Though Al-Khatahtbeh’s media outlet Muslim has a large TikTok following, TikTok is banned in India and potentially soon the U.S., making it even harder to get Muslim-related news to crucial populations.

“When stories impact the Muslim community people depend on us to be reporting on and amplifying these stories,” he said.

Meta cutting off Al-Khatahtbeh’s access to one of his largest audiences might also have financial consequences, he said. Given that his Indian audience accounted for such a significant portion of his following and because they were so engaged, he worries his reach will plummet and it will be harder to get his news into people’s feeds. Instagram’s algorithms view massive drops in engagement as a negative symbol, which could potentially result in @Muslim’s stories being shown to fewer users globally. “If it’s a 30 day blackout or something, it would be ok,” he said, “but if it’s forever then I’ll need to figure something out. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“People depend on us,” he said, “they send us videos and news and they say, please share this… Muslim stories need a platform.”

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