Social Media Companies Silence Kashmiri Voices
By Elaine Pasquini
Berkeley, CA: The recently-published report by Stand With Kashmir, titled E-Occupied: How Social Media Corporations Enable Silence on Kashmir, was the subject of a November 16 program hosted by Hatem Bazian, director of Berkeley’s Islamophobia Studies Center and professor at the University of California and Zaytuna College.
“Social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, have managed to allow India to completely silence Kashmir and basically not allow communication to occur at a critical juncture where daily oppression is taking place,” Bazian said.
“It seems that the social media companies have made a decision on which side of justice they stand on,” he continued. “They stand on the side which amplifies the voices of the oppressor…and the long hand of governments while suppressing and silencing the collective voices of those that are living under dire circumstances.”
Ifat Gazia, PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts and host of The Kashmir Podcast, described her work on the report recently published by Stand With Kashmir. “It’s not new that Kashmiri voices have been choked,” she said. “There has always been a dearth of physical public spaces in Kashmir and when the internet was introduced Kashmiris had this alternate space and pubic sphere where they could talk about issues when they were frustrated and angry.”
In 2019 and 2020, the Indian government cut internet and phone connectivity to Kashmir, plunging more than eight million people into a pre-internet age. “Kashmir has experienced the longest internet blockage ever enforced in a democracy,” Gazia emphasized.
This new report by Stand With Kashmir calls out big tech companies for blocking Kashmiris from their platforms, making them complicit in enabling the silence on Kashmir.
“Despite its global reputation for democracy, India is one of the biggest censors of the internet, a behavior almost universally accepted to be more characteristic of autocracies than democracies,” she stated.
India also achieves its censorship goals by ordering internet service providers to block selected websites within a certain geographical reach. Since March 2021 the social media pages and website for Stand With Kashmir remain geographically blocked from users in Kashmir and India.
In its report, 62 percent of Kashmiris who participated said they experienced censorship on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The report’s recommendations to social media corporations are as follows:
1. Immediately reinstate all content removed and accounts suspended in violation of international norms of freedom of expression.
2. Undertake a human rights impact assessment of the situation in Kashmir, which takes into account India’s military occupation of Kashmir and its human rights record in the region, including its history of blockading telecommunication services and curtailment of Kashmiris’ political stage and expression. Such assessment must include the corporation’s policies, products, programs and partnerships in the region with regard to the protection of freedom of expression and protection of privacy.
3. Investigate reports pointing to Indian government and political parties’ longstanding use of “IT cells” for creating disinformation and suppressing marginalized populations in the digital space by trolling accounts. Disinformation and troll accounts must be removed from the platforms.
4. Hire fact-checkers to look at content pertaining to Kashmir with a human rights and anti-occupation lens.
5. Make available information on content or removal requests by the Indian government or actors affiliated with it.
6. Provide transparency on the restriction or removal of user’s content related to Kashmir, based on their current community standards, guidelines or policy.
7. Suspend the use of artificial intelligence mechanisms for review of Kashmir-related content. They must form ethics committees of independent Kashmiri researchers, scholars and civil society groups with expertise in human rights and international law to review content removal and restrictions related to Kashmir, subject to data privacy and protection requirements.
8. Designate specific staff members for conducting outreach with civil society groups and advocacy organizations in an issue-specific and need-based manner.
9. Increase investment in Hindi-language and Hinglish content and create a database of hate speech and Islamophobic terminology that harms Kashmiris and marginalized populations in India.
“Platforms like Twitter need to understand that they are being used by the Indian government and their allies to silence Kashmiris and other vulnerable groups across the world,” Gazia said.
Huma Dar, now a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, has deep roots in Kashmir. Her family was ethnically cleansed from Kashmir in 1948-1949 for supporting the Kashmiris’ struggle for self-determination. Her maternal family was exiled from Kashmir after converting to Islam during the Dogra rule and fighting against the repressive regime.
Her Facebook account, she explained, was permanently disabled in 2016 for posting photos of the funeral of 22-year-old Kashmiri freedom fighter, Burhan Wani, reportedly attended by 700,000 mourners. The population of India-occupied Kashmir at that time was eight million people. “Since I do not live in India, I did not think I would be targeted,” Dar explained.
At one point, Twitter sent her an email stating that some of her tweets “might be in transgression of the Indian law,” she related. “Why are Twitter and Facebook acting as the handmaiden of fascist genocidal mass murderer Modi whose hands are stained in Muslim blood?”
Ramah Kudaimi, campaign director of Action Center on Race and Economy (ACRE), also addressed how the tech companies discriminate against Muslims and other minorities.
“This idea that Muslims and others had to become dehumanized as terrorists in order to justify their repression and the need to fight terrorism created a profit motive for corporations described as ‘terror capitalism,’ ” she said. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter are among the firms profiting from “terror capitalism.”
“We should use the power we have to organize against these tech companies because they cannot exist without us,” she said. “Even though they are putting their profits ahead of us…and are preferring to work and serve state interests ahead of us, without us they can’t work at all.”
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
