Wael Abbas, who is a prominent Egyptian blogger and human rights activist, recently started a Facebook group to express solidarity with and in support of formerly jailed blogger, Mohammed Adel. Sad thing is that Facebook deemed it as against it Terms of Use and took it down.

Wael has termed the take down ‘racist’ and wants it to be rescinded forthwith.  Abbas had created the group ‘Operation General Meit‘ a few months ago in support of the then incarcerated blogger, Adel.  Abbas says the action is a blatant example of double standards as Facebook is full of profile photos and other photos showing guns, while those that were posted on the group’s page were symbolic as they called for the authorities to arrest them as they had they had done to Adel.  The group had photos of various Egyptian bloggers hold fake guns saying that if indeed Adel was a terrorist then they also should be arrested as they were also terrorists.

Menassat quotes Abbas.

I consider what Facebook did racist and dealing with middle-easterners with double standards because Facebook is full of groups about guns. Facebook is full of groups for movie posters, gangster rap pages and pages dedicated to pistols and machine guns, Real ones. None were deleted. Only Egyptians when they pose with toy guns are hateful, threatening and obscene.  Please type “guns” in the Facebook search bar and tell me what you see.

We feel that in doing this Facebook is continuing with what we are seeing as an emerging trend where companies and corporates take actions to censor speech on the platforms and then blame them on their TOS’s.

Shame on you Facebook.