Image Courtesy:gaurilankeshnews.com
Slain journalist Gauri Lankesh continues to strike so much fear in the hearts of right-wing extremists, even from beyond the grave, that they now appear to have used their influence to have a website launched a year after her death blocked from sharing content on Facebook!
NaanuGauri.com , a Kannada news website, has allegedly been blocked from Facebook. An official statement released by the team that brings out the digital publication says, “Facebook has blocked Gaurilankesh media’s Kannada website completely.” It appears the website’s links shared on Facebook were mass reported and thus flagged by the platform for having allegedly violated community standards.
The statement says, “This is a dark day. We tried our best to communicate to FB that naanugauri(dot)com is a reputed and respected news website. Its not just adhering to FB community standards, we try to follow Journalistic ethics to our best possible effort and we publish content which is always verified and checked.”
They further say, “From yesterday Facebook is not allowing us to share any of our links and they have hidden all the links shared previously. They have failed to give any specific reason for the same, except throwing a message like ‘You have violated our community standards’, which is far from being true.”
NaanuGauri.com is a widely read Kanada news website and many activists, scholars and journalists of repute have regularly contributed to it. Some of them are; H S Doreswamy, Devanuru Mahadeva, Yogendra Yadav, Prashant Bhushan, A Narayana and Amit Basule.
The team says, “If they (FB) can specify any valid and specific reasons of violating community standards we are indeed ready to correct as well,” adding “With growing polarisation across the country some sections of people associated with far right wing politics having malicious intent might have deliberately campaigned against us and they might have reported our links to FB.”
The statement further says that they expect “Facebook should have some basic system in place to verify such false and untrustworthy campaigns against only few trustworthy media houses remaining in this country, (naanugauri being one of them).”
Gauri Lankesh was gunned down by members of a right-wing extremist organisation on September 5, 2018. Investigations into her assassination also helped uncover a terror plot by members of the same extremist organisation and other associated groups.
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