BICOM

A webpage on the social networking site Facebook, which called for a third Palestinian Intifada (uprising) was taken down by the website’s management on Tuesday. The page was removed following widespread condemnation. Facebook site monitors said that the page was removed because the administrators of the page were found to have participated in calls of violence.

The decision to remove the page came after a previous decision where Facebook refused to remove the page but said it would remove posts that may incite to violence. “We continue to believe that people on Facebook should be able to express their opinions, and we don’t typically take down content that speaks out against countries, religions, political entities, or ideas. However, we monitor pages that are reported to us, and when they degrade to direct calls for violence or expressions of hate – as occurred in this case – we have, and will continue to, take them down,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

The page written in Arabic had more than 340,000 fans and called for Palestinians to take to the streets on 15 May to begin an uprising, in a similar way to the two previous uprisings. Several copycat pages have sprung up since the removal of the main page, but with much less activity and followers.