Bangladesh has now become the second country in South Asia to ban Facebook due to a page on the social networking site that suggested people draw images of the prophet Muhammad.
Zia Ahmed, the chief telecommunication regulator in Bangladesh, has confirmed that access to Facebook has been blocked at the present time due to the site’s publication of caricatures that could offend people in the predominantly Muslim nation.
This announcement comes just over a week after a court in Pakistan ordered the government in the country to block Facebook for the same reason.
The Facebook page which caused the outcry in the Muslim world is called ‘Everyone Draw Mohammed Day!’ It encouraged users on the site to submit pictures of the prophet on May 20th.
It has been reported that Bangladesh’s decision to block access to the site has disappointed many Facebook users there. The Bangladesh ISP Association estimates that there are almost 1 million people signed up to the site in the country. Farzan Hasan, a Bangladeshi Facebook user, commented: “The government should have stopped the objectionable page rather than blocking the entire site.”
In Pakistan, the Facebook ban was lifted on Monday after management at the networking site removed the offending page. A government official announced: "In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL".
Facing cries from other quarters about its complex privacy settings, Facebook announced last week that it would roll out a new version of its privacy settings, apparently much simpler, over the next few weeks. However civil liberties groups are saying that the new changes are not enough and that the company should revert back to around a year ago, when most settings were marked private by default.
