Facebook banning Sikh posts

After yesterday’s mass Facebook banning of posts and accounts across the Sikhisphere we have done some digging into what has and is going on.

Facebook has introduced some new words to their lists of banned terms, two we found to be popular yesterday were ‘Baba Gurbachan Singh Manochahal’ and ‘Bhai Jugraj Singh Toofan.’ So any posts that had used these names were deleted and facebook users notified that they had violated facebook community standards, some accounts were completely unpublished/deleted, others had 60 day bans introduced, others were banned from advertising or doing any facebook lives for 30 days etc Most of the posts that were now banned under this new purview of regulations ranged from anything between 2-5 years old.

Here is a useful article which details how facebook implements its procedures to delete or ban material

Why Facebook Deletes Your Posts for Community Standards

Ironically all content from this website above is also banned from being shared on facebook. In short the article states that facebook can and will delete posts promoting violent organisations or violent actions. This is where they have decided to delete posts about Sikh freedom fighters and in the extreme example our film review about the film ‘Toofan Singh’ which is now available to view for free on

https://youtu.be/qDWJllytQwM

But you can appeal to facebook if you so wish at https://m.facebook.com/help/186570224871049 our appeal against the film review failed and they upheld the ban on facebook.

With all this said the simple fact is all Sikh organisations need to go back to old school and new school methods of conveying their messages to their service users and audiences by:

1. Making their websites their central portals to drive traffic/users/audience. Akaal Publishers has started to do this with the use of posting important updates on our blog on this website, but we need to do better too.
2. Developing methods to contact their users/audience directly via whatsapp, email, apps or methodology conducive to the services they provide.

We need to take hold of our own agenda and not be victims to reliance on social media platforms which are run by private profit led organisations and become true sovereigns of the digital age that drive our own perspective forward without the risk of being gagged by others.