The Great Smoky Mountain Journal
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Posted: Tuesday, January 01, 2019 02:36 PM
Burmese "Bin Laden" Buddhist Monk Ashin Wirathu Kicked Off Facebook After Racist Rant
Wirathu, who has used social media to disseminate anti-Muslim hate speech and racist comments, was kicked off the platform in January. A Facebook spokesman told Agence France-Press that the page violated its standards and ultimately took action because of it.
“If a person consistently shares content promoting hate, we may take a range of actions such as temporarily suspending their ability to post and ultimately, removal of their account,” the spokesperson said, according to Time magazine.
Facebook has not yet responded to a request for comment from Fox News.
Facebook, dealing with domestic issues that its platform was used unscrupulously by Russian operatives to alter the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, is also facing issues across the globe, including in Myanmar, Wirathu's home country, where it has been accused of failing to curb anti-Rohingya propaganda.
The Rohingya people, a majority of which are Muslim, are denied citizenship under the 1982 Myanmar nationality law.
A Twitter account that may be (but unconfirmed by Fox News) associated with Wirathu is still active. The bio on the Twitter account describes Wirathu as "A Burmese anti-Muslim Buddhist monk. A writer. A co-founder of the association for the Protection of Race and Religion." The account has not tweeted since 2016.
In a 2014 interview with VICE, Wirathu claimed he was being misrepresented and misunderstood.
“I’m trying to educate the people not to [retaliate], but these aggressive Muslims must be brought to justice,” Wirathu said in the interview.
Approximately 400,000 Rohingya lived in Myanmar as of November 2017, but nearly 700,000 of them have fleed to Bangladesh following insurgent attacks, Time magazine noted. The crisis has been labeled an ethnic cleansing by the U.N.
He was also profiled in 2013 by Time, being featured as a cover story entitled ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror.'
Facebook is intensely popular in Myanmar, due in large part to the wide availability of smartphones and Internet connectivity.
Facebook, which has over 2.1 billion monthly active users (MAUs) worldwide, has 828 million MAUs in the Asia-Pacific region, according to its latest quarterly results. The company does not publicly break out its user base by country, but a 2016 report from the Myanmar Times said Facebook had attracted 10 million users in the country.