According to media reports, the militant Islamist Taliban use Facebook’s WhatsApp chat service, which they, as an American company, have to block. The Washington Post wrote that the Taliban had told Kabul residents via WhatsApp groups that they were taking control of the city.
A WhatsApp spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the chat service had to obey US sanctions – and that includes removing profiles “that identify themselves as official Taliban accounts.” At the same time, further information is requested from the US authorities “in view of the changing situation in Afghanistan”.
Facebook removes Taliban-friendly content
The chats on WhatsApp are protected with end-to-end encryption. This means that, in principle, only the users involved, but not the platform itself, have access to the content of the conversations in plain text. WhatsApp therefore analyzes information available for the service such as names, photos or profile descriptions in order to identify problematic groups.
Overall, Facebook is proactively looking for Taliban-friendly content and removing it from the platform, stressed Instagram boss Adam Mosseri on Bloomberg TV. At the same time, he restricted that the situation was developing rapidly. “We will have to adapt what we do and how we do it in order to respond to changing risks.”
(Basics / dpa)
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