Facebook briefly blocks Dhruv Rathee's account for sharing excerpts from Hitler's biography

UPDATE: A Facebook spokesperson has responded to the suspension of the account saying, “Our Community Standards the policies that set out what we do and don’t allow on Facebook. Our 15,000 content reviewers based around the world review millions of pieces of content every day in over 50 languages, including many different Indian languages - and sometimes they make mistakes. In this case, our content reviewers mistakenly removed a piece of content posted by Dhruv Rathee, leading to the temporary disabling of his account. We were alerted to our error, and acted swiftly to restore Dhruv’s profile and content. We’re really sorry for any inconvenience caused.” The 2019 General Elections are only 30 days away. Social media platforms are one of the most crucial campaign mediums. These two independent statements make more sense together when you see YouTuber and activist Dhruv Rathee’s latest tweet about his Facebook account being blocked for the next 30 days.

Today, @Facebook banned my account for 30 days.

What a coincidence that elections are 30 days away also and what a coincidence that my engagement rates are one of the biggest in India, competing with BJP’s top propganda pages, including Modi’s official page. pic.twitter.com/aVECxhT4NE

— Dhruv Rathee (@dhruv_rathee) March 17, 2019

For the uninitiated, Dhruv Rathee is a 23-year-old YouTuber who often shares his commentary on national and international news, and he calls himself ‘politically centrist’. He has over 1.7 million subscribers on YouTube and is followed by over 2.2 million people on Twitter. Apparently, his “engagement rates are one of the biggest in India, competing with BJP’s top propaganda pages, including [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi’s official page”. Rathee’s account has been blocked owing to a post he recently shared on Facebook where he shared some paragraphs from the biography of Adolf Hitler. Facebook told the YouTuber that the post violated their community standards.

The reason they banned the account is because they say following post goes against community standards 👇

But in this post,
- Not a single abusive word
- Not a single disrespectful word

Is educating people about Hitler through Britannica encyclopedia against FB’s standards? pic.twitter.com/xpxMatCbeX

— Dhruv Rathee (@dhruv_rathee) March 17, 2019

Whether mere coincidence or just bad luck, the timing of the ban is certainly unfortunate.