Facebook has removed the page of a monk from Myanmar who had once been dubbed as the “Buddhist Bin Laden” for allegedly sharing inflammatory posts about Muslims, AFP reported on Tuesday. A Facebook spokesperson told the news agency that Ashin Wirathu’s page had been disabled.
Wirathu had used the platform to make posts against Muslims, including Rohingya Muslims who have been fleeing Rakhine state since August 2017 following a military crackdown. Wirathu is the leader of the Burmese anti-Muslim movement and is also part of the Patriotic Association of Myanmar.
He has been accused of inciting sectarian violence earlier. In 2016, the Myanmar government had dissolved the Patriotic Association of Myanmar and sentenced the monk with a one-year speaking ban, AFP reported. In 2013, the monk had appeared on the cover of Time as “The Face of Buddhist Terror”.
“Our community standards prohibit organizations and people dedicated to promoting hatred and violence against others”, the Facebook spokesperson said. “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.”
In 2017 when Wirathu’s account was temporarily suspended for 30 days, he had claimed that Facebook was “occupied by the Muslims”. In an interview to The Guardian in 2017, he had said, “I am only warning people about Muslims. Consider it like if you had a dog that would bark at strangers coming to your house – it is to warn you. I am like that dog. I bark.”
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