KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – The Taliban authorities have announced their plan to restrict or completely block access to the Facebook platform in Afghanistan, saying it’s to prevent wastage of time and money.
In his recent interview with the local news outlet, TOLOnews, the Taliban Minister for Telecommunication and Information Technology, Najibullah Haqqani, said that the country’s youth currently need education and should not be distracted by social media.
“Our youth are in a situation where they are academically weak and the majority of them are illiterate. Wasting their time and spending money on these things is to the benefit of the company and to the detriment of the nation.”
The Taliban authority did not provide further details about the implementation timeframe of the plan. However, the regime has a history of imposing restrictions on the media and freedom of expression.
Throughout the years, the regime has welcomed social media as a useful tool to propagate its political and ideological narratives. Since the group’s resurgence to power in August 2021, its officials or senior members have appeared in public discussions on social media such as Twitter Spaces.
However, with the flight of international and most of the country’s local media, platforms such as Facebook and twitter have growingly become the only public square available to the people. In an environment flooded with information, misinformation, and disinformation, the regime struggles to find a balance between maximizing its own gains from the social media spaces while minimizing the opportunity for the citizens to criticize or even potentially mobilize.
While the Taliban minister attributed the decision to waste of time and money, his deputy, Enayat Ullah Alokozai, told EFE, a Spanish news outlet, earlier that Facebook contradicted the principles of the regime by restricting its officials.
“When a country’s government cannot benefit from a platform, that platform may not be efficient,” he said.
This Taliban decision to restrict access to Facebook in Afghanistan comes as “Meta,” Facebook’s parent company, has already blocked accounts associated with the Taliban and its government institutions under U.S. “anti-terrorism” laws.
After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, a spokesman of the company told the Guardian that “The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under US law, and they are banned from Facebook and Instagram under our dangerous organization policies.”
“This means we remove accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support and representation of them,” he said.
However, the Taliban authorities and the regime’s lobbyist take advantage of using X (formerly known as Twitter) where they face no restriction on their activities.
Despite numerous calls and pleas from citizens of Afghanistan on X and its chief, Elon Musk, to ban Taliban accounts due to illegal and misuse of the platform, the company, unlike Meta, has not blocked the Taliban accounts and content on the platform.
The potential blocking of Facebook in Afghanistan comes amidst escalating restrictions on citizens’ access to independent and free media. Many have been detained and imprisoned simply for expressing critical views on social media platforms.
The Taliban has a history of imposing media restrictions. These restrictions include limitations on local radio and television broadcasts, as well as the shutdown of international radio stations broadcasting in Afghanistan, such as Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.
The Taliban Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology further emphasized that nobody has the right to violate people’s privacy. “If needed, only the security institutions are allowed to access their places only to prevent anti-security cases and to pursue criminals.”
