By Phuntsok Yangchen
DHARAMSHALA, December 30: The removal of a Facebook post by a noted Tibetan writer based in Beijing has sparked angry response by Tibetans and supporters.
“This is a shame. It was google a few years ago and now it is Facebook. Facebook must truly live up to the principles of freedom of expression and speech,” said Tenzin Tsepel, a Tibetan IT professional in Bangalore.
Tsering Dorjee, another Tibetan who claims to have been using the social networking site as early as 2007, said , “It is weird that Facebook should be doing something as cheap as this but with China being home to the world’s largest Internet users and Facebook’s expanding business I am not surprised.”
Beijing based Tibetan writer who had been honored with various awards including one by the US State Department said she posted information about a 37 year old Tibetan monk Kalsang Yeshi who died after setting his body alight earlier this month and included a link to a video of the monk in flames.
Woeser, according to a report by Telegraph, was told the video “didn’t meet Facebook’s community standards.” She said she couldn’t believe [her] eyes” when she read the deletion notice. “How is it that this has become like a Chinese website?” she was quoted as saying.
Facebook later issued a statement citing the “graphic” nature of the video as the reason for its action. However, Tibetans accuse the social networking site aspiring to enter the Chinese market has cowed to Beijing’s pressure following Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘s enthusiastic visit to China.
Woeser, however, said she believed the post may have been deleted because of the disturbing nature of the self-immolation, or because of efforts to censor material that might be critical of the Chinese government. She joined Facebook in 2008 and has posted extensively about protests by Tibetans including the spate of self-immolations but this was the first time the company had removed her content, she said.
Zuckerberg was also photographed recently laughing in his California offices alongside China’s internet tsar Lu Wei, and with a copy of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s book prominent on his desk, the report said.
Chinese activist Hu Jia tweeted at the time that Facebook was “risking repeating the mistakes of Yahoo” by being overfriendly to Chinese demands.
Facebook is currently blocked in China but Lu has hinted that a deal could still be struck. “I didn’t say Facebook could not enter China, but nor did I say that it could,” Lu told a press conference in October. “We could not allow any companies to enter China’s market and make money while hurting the country.”
Information from Tibet is strictly controlled by the Chinese government, prompting one Tibet scholar to note “there are more foreign journalists right now in North Korea than there are in Tibet”, The Telegraph said.
Since 2009, 136 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in Tibet protesting against China’s occupation of Tibet and its hard line policies.
