Despite our efforts, social media platform Instagram has been unwilling to restore our account (@balochistantimes), which it permanently disabled three weeks ago on the pretext that we had ‘violated’ its community guidelines. As for what those supposed violations were, we have been given no specific answer. Meanwhile, we remain without one of the important platforms to share the stories of the Baloch people, who face the might of Pakistan’s powerful army almost daily.
This, to put it plainly, is censorship. The thing that makes it worse is that we suspect it was done at the request of the Pakistani government, which operates at the pleasure of Pakistan’s military establishment, the force responsible for suppressing the Baloch people, an ethnic minority in Pakistan.
The mainstream Pakistani media has long been under the ‘control’ of the military and has been unable or maybe even unwilling to give space to the acts of violence committed by the army in Balochistan. In such a scenario, social media has been one of the few venues where minorities could raise their voices for the world to hear. Platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram were places where persecuted people in Pakistan, such as the Baloch, the Pashtuns, and the Hazaras, could share their pain. But these platforms are no longer out of the reach of the Pakistani state’s long arm.
We had a relatively large following on Instagram, with about 30,000 people following us on the platform. In places such as the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchestan, where Twitter and Facebook are banned, Instagram was the only means for us to connect with our audience.
This is not the first instance of censorship that we have faced. Instagram permanently disabled our Balochi-language account last year without giving us a chance to even go through the generic appeal process that they have. We just received a curt message that the account was gone, and that we should forget about it.
Meta platforms, like all other social media apps, consider themselves torchbearers of the principles of freedom of speech. But in reality, they act as tools in the hands of suppressive regimes. They protect their business interests at the cost of the suffering of the most vulnerable communities in the world.
Balochistan has problems, Pakistani military-made problems, and those problems need reporting. Enforced disappearances need reporting, the extrajudicial killing of activists needs reporting, and so do all the other problems that ethnic and linguistic minorities, and even mainstream opposition political parties, face in the country.
We were under the impression that it was normal to report on those problems, but we were wrong. It seems the new normal on Mr Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms is to censor all those who report on human rights violations in Pakistan, which is a country that even presidents of the United States of America have said sponsors terrorism.
