Online uproar as Facebook hides 12,000 posts with #ResignModi hashtag

Facebook temporarily hid more than 12,000 posts containing the hashtag #ResignModi, following the Indian government’s poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic that is ravaging the country.

Facebook users in the country took to Twitter to show Facebook’s restrictions of all posts that contained the hashtag.

When searching for the hashtag, users were taken to a message that “some content in those posts goes against our Community Standards.”

“We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

This comes after Twitter censored or removed more than 50 tweets that were critical of India’s handling of the pandemic under a government emergency order to the microblogging site.

India set another record on Thursday, with 379,257 new cases of the virus and 3,645 deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing the totals to 18.3 million cases and 204,832 deaths.

Experts believe both figures are an underestimate, but it is unclear by how much.