Facebook Blocks Politically Sensitive Sites

 

TIME magazine has this to say:

An American may have invented Facebook, but when it comes to social networking, we can't touch Malaysia.

A study showed that Malaysians have the most friends on their social networks, averaging at 233 digital friends per user.

Malaysians were also the heaviest users of social networking sites, spending a whopping nine hours per week on average communicating with their hoards of online friends.

So it is a grave mistake for Facebook to block the publishing rights of the page “Malaysians for Beng Hock”.

The administrators of the above-mentioned page have this to say:

The arbitrary and undemocratic governance of Facebook on its users is not only tyrannical in itself, it is open to manipulation by authoritarian regimes to shut down facebook activism by making a lot of or high-powered complaints.

From our knowledge, at least two other politically-critical pages - ‘Justice for Beng Bock’ and ‘save Jamal on Air’ pages were also terminated by Facebook without reasons.

As both the death of Beng Hock and sacking of 988 deejay Jamaluddin Ibrahim are highly controversial issues in Malaysia, these raise the legitimate suspicion if such blocking was the outcome of some backdoor crackdown operation on new media, made possible by Facebook’s arbitrary governance.

It is entirely expected that our scum-of-the-earth government would pressure Facebook with a request like this, but very surprising that Facebook would accede to that.

After all, Facebook have the highest number of users in Malaysia and you don't want to piss them off.