LONDON: Controversial comments made in 2018 by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson were posted by a media watchdog under dummy Facebook accounts and were then removed by the social media platform for hate speech.
Big Brother Watch (BBW) devised the experiment to test Facebook’s content policies — and found that the social media site, owned by tech giant Meta, views words used by Johnson to be “harassment and bullying.”
Johnson wrote a column in August 2018 for the Daily Telegraph newspaper in which he said Muslim women in burqas resembled post boxes.
Repeating those comments, the BBW dummy account posted a picture of Muslim women with the caption: “It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.” The account was blocked for harassment and bullying.
A remark made by shadow chancellor Angela Rayner in February this year — “Shoot your terrorists and ask questions second” — was also blocked by the platform for breaching its violence and incitement policy.
The UK Conservative Party has often found itself criticized for controversial comments and its attitude towards Muslims. After an independent investigation, Johnson’s comments were found not to have breached the party’s code of conduct.
Johnson has also previously referred to Muslim women as looking like “bank robbers.”
Conservative ministers have been accused of dragging their feet in tackling Islamophobia within the party and wider country. Earlier this year, the senior Conservative politician Nusrat Ghani, who was the UK’s first female Muslim minister, claimed that she had been discriminated against by the party when she was demoted from the position of Under Secretary of State for Transport because her “Muslimness” was “making colleagues uncomfortable.”
In the aftermath of that row, Qari Asim, an imam appointed by the government in 2019 to tackle Islamophobia, said he had received no “meaningful engagement” from ministers “in years.”