“And there have been cases in India, for example, where someone said, ‘Hey, if the police don’t take care of this, our supporters will get in there and clear the streets’,” Mark Zuckerberg said.
Mark Zuckerberg referred to the BJP leader Kapil Mishra’s speech earlier this year before the Delhi riots, where he threatened of vigilante action against the anti-CAA protestors, which seems to have become the yardstick to judge such kind of provocative content on social media platforms.
While providing to outline clear social media incitement during a video interaction with his employees Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly quoted Kapil Mishra’s threat, though he did not directly name the BJP leader.
“And there have been cases in India, for example, where someone said, ‘Hey, if the police don’t take care of this, our supporters will get in there and clear the streets’,” Mark Zuckerberg said.
“That is kind of encouraging supporters to go do that in a more direct way, and we took that down. So we have a precedent for that,” he further added.
Amid the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protests, Facebook had come under heavy fire for its failure to flag or takedown controversial posts made by US President Donald Trump. An interaction was held amid a churn at Facebook over Facebook’s handling of the US President’s posts and many employees of Facebook being unhappy with the social media giant’s decision to go ahead with Trump’s “looting and shooting” remarks.
Zuckerberg’s statements appeared to be in reference to the speech of BJP leader Kapil Mishra which he gave before the violence erupted in North-East Delhi in late February.
In his speech, Mishra had given a three-day ultimatum to police to clear-off the roads where anti-CAA demonstrations were happening.
“We will maintain peace until (US President) Donald Trump is in India. After that, we refuse to listen to even the police if the roads are not cleared…. we will be forced to hit the streets,” Mishra was heard saying in a video shared on social media.
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