Facebook has announced that it has banned the Taliban and the content in support of them from the platform, considering them a terrorist organization. A spokesperson for the Menlo Park group further explained to the BBC that a team of Afghan experts has been tasked with monitoring and removing content related to the Afghan insurgents. The experts, explained the spokesman, “are native speakers of Dari and Pashto and have knowledge of the local context: they can help us identify the problems that arise on the platform”.
The social media giant added that he did not want to take any kind of decision on whether or not to recognize national governments, but to follow “the authority of the international community”. With regard to the ban, Facebook stressed that the same limitations apply to its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp, but the latter is still used by the Taliban to communicate, as has happened in recent years.