Facebook: Fake accounts of MPs to be removed

Two government divisions have separately taken initiatives to make sure that the 350 parliament members have verified Facebook accounts and remove all fake accounts.

At a press conference in her office yesterday, State Minister for Posts and Telecommunications Tarana Halim said they already discussed the matter with the regional Facebook authorities during a meeting in Singapore on March 30.

"Now, we will send a letter to the speaker of the House to collect the Facebook IDs of each of its members for sending those to the Facebook authorities …,” she said.

"And after verification, all other accounts [of lawmakers] will be declared as fake and these will be removed from the site," Tarana said.

Before Tarana's press conference, State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Division Zunaid Ahmed Palak also announced that they would take an initiative to verify all the lawmakers' Facebook accounts.

On March 30, Palak also had a meeting with Ime Archibong, vice-president of Facebook, at Silicon Valley in the USA where he had talked about lawmakers' Facebook accounts verification, said a press release on Sunday. 

In Singapore, Tarana attended the meeting with -- Vikram Langeh, manager of trust and safety of Facebook, and Ankhil Das, its public policy director of India, South and Central Asia -- about the same issue.

About two divisions with the same plan, Tarana said if they could coordinate the issue, it would bring a positive result to the government and to this end, she would sit with Palak soon.

She also said Facebook responded to about 65 percent of the complaints submitted by the Bangladesh government in 2017.

"The home ministry will set up a special desk to get information on militancy-related issue and social media-related crimes. The desk will then forward these to the Facebook authorities for necessary action,” she added.

Tarana also discussed general fake Facebook accounts and agreed to block those if Bangladesh sent the Facebook authorities URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) of those accounts.

Facebook is deeply concerned with militancy and it had blocked accounts when militancy contents were found, said Tarana.