The government of Tajikistan has ordered all ISPs and mobile operators to cut off access to Facebook. According to the country’s telecom chief, Beg Zuhurov, “hundreds of citizens” had called him, requesting that Facebook be shut down because it was a “hotbed of slander.”
If you’re wondering what exactly this means, it seems that Tajikistan had set up a group of observers to monitor online activity and the group has reported back saying that people have been getting paid to write offensive material about the government on the site.
This has led to the government calling for a ban on the popular networking site, which currently caters to about 41,000 citizens of the nation, which is only 6% of the total population. The government has said that the ban will stay in place until Mark Zuckerberg flies down to Tajikistan to discuss the alleged criticism of the government.
This isn’t the first time a government has tried to cap down on free speech on the popular social networking site. Just a few months ago, the Indian government had taken Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and several others to court over providing a platform where people “were spreading hateful messages that were dividing the community as a whole.”
All in all, the trend of censorship across the web is spreading, it would seem.