LAHORE: The Instagram account of ProperGaanda, a Pakistan-based digital media platform, has been suspended for “violating community guidelines” after the portal purportedly posted content involving the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August last year and life since then for marginalised communities residing in the impoverished country, the management of the website said.
The account was taken down after ProperGaanda posted content “in relation to reporting on the realities of what is happening in Afghanistan”, it said in a press statement.
🧵: Are progressive voices in Pakistan always snubbed? Why hasn’t @Meta/@instagram been responsive, as it has been more than 2-weeks, and our page has still not been recovered. This is not the first time, our platform has been at Instagram’s gun! #RestoreProperGaanda pic.twitter.com/TBoCuUHxdy
— Propergaanda (@propergaanda) September 6, 2022
“We had a similar incident happen in November 2020, when our Facebook reach was markedly cut (by almost 85 percent) for more than six months; our monetisation was also revoked and has still not been reinstated,” it recalled
The portal says it focuses on “curating stories primarily about social taboos that are usually ignored, especially minority rights, trans[gender] rights and giving coverage to underrepresented communities.”
A communications manager at ProperGaanda said the company has reason to believe that its account was reported due to wrong targeting by far-right extremist groups or error on the META platform’s behalf, for which it said it apologised as well.
“On multiple occasions, people have tried to hack our account. Once they also hacked the founder, Hamza Ghaznavi’s account and though that they tried to delete ProperGaanda’s main page they were unsuccessful. Following this incident, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) also took notice of the attempt and took action against the concerned parties,” it said.
The statement said: “On August 23, we received a copyright violation on a post we did on August 20. The claim was made by News Media Net Australia for using their video on our Instagram account.
However, after finding out the source of the video, we did a fact-check report on Geo News and said the video was of Australian origin, not Pakistan. “Before we could take down our post, the poster got reported without a review option and was deleted,” the statement said.
“At 6:00 pm on August 24, our Instagram page was disabled. We would really appreciate it if you could guide us on how to resolve this. We are in touch with the company that made the copyright claim and they retracted it on the 25th.”
