The U.S. State Department does not list the Afghan Taliban
as a Foreign Terrorist Organization like it does the Pakistani Taliban. But Washington
does sanction the group as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist,"
which freezes the U.S. assets of those blacklisted and bars Americans from
working with them.
"They will not be allowed while they are prescribed by
the U.S. law and even if they were not prescribed by U.S. law, we would have to
do a policy analysis on whether or not they nevertheless violate our dangerous
organizations policy,” Facebook's vice president of content policy Monika
Bickert said on a call with reporters about the company's latest community
standards enforcement report.
Facebook says it designates the Taliban a terrorist group
and bans it from its platforms. Bickert said the ban had been in place before
she joined the company in 2012.
Major tech companies have faced scrutiny about how they will
handle the group that has seized control in Afghanistan following a withdrawal
of U.S. troops. Alphabet Inc's YouTube said that it bans the group due to U.S.
sanctions, but Twitter Inc has allowed the group to have a presence.
"In 2001 when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, these
companies did not exist," said Rose Jackson, director of the Democracy
& Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab,
and they now face consequential decisions akin to state determinations of
governments.
The Taliban have become digitally savvy and now use a wide
range of social media platforms and messaging services like Facebook's WhatsApp
and Telegram to communicate with Afghan citizens and the international
community.
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