By Elizabeth Culliford
(Reuters) – Facebook may not lift its ban on the Taliban even if the United States stops imposing sanctions on the group, which has rapidly taken control of Afghanistan, the social media company’s policy chief said on Wednesday.
“They will not be allowed while they are prescribed by the U.S. law and even if they were not prescribed by U.S. law, we would have to do a policy analysis on whether or not they nevertheless violate our dangerous organizations policy,” Facebook’s vice president of content policy Monika Bickert said on a call with reporters about the company’s latest community standards enforcement report.
The U.S. State Department does not list the Afghan Taliban as a Foreign Terrorist Organization like it does the Pakistani Taliban. But Washington does sanction the group as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” which freezes the U.S. assets of those blacklisted and bars Americans from working with them.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Culliford in London, England; Editing by Howard Goller)
