Religious debate on social media unchecked

LAHORE
Open discussion on controversial religious issues on social media by followers of different sects is promoting hatred.
These days social media has become a popular forum to interact with each other but this medium is turning into a tickling time bomb in Pakistan as there is no checks and balances to stop or ban hate speech and related content from this medium.
As the month of Muharram is going on peacefully in the country but the war is on full heat among the followers of different sects on the social media who are openly raising controversial issues and criticising each other. Different people have also created polls, graphics and pictorial questions about each other’s faith and are posting them in different groups, fora, pages on Facebook, twitter and other social media sites instigating their fellow followers to promote these posts.
A number of users of social media have urged the government and its related departments to take strict action against this ongoing hate speech. Worldwide, hate speech is defined as any spoken or physical action that negatively targets a person or a group of people based on ethnicity, gender or religion.
Shahid Iqbal, a senior lawyer while talking to The News, said that under section 153-A Pakistan Penal Code hate speech was a crime and action could be taken against anyone harming the religious faith of others by promoting “enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities”. He said this was the job of law enforcing agencies to monitor what was going on on social media and track down the person who initiated a particular post or giving comment(s), which comes under hate speech. He said the government could also use Cyber Crime laws to take action in this regard.
The ongoing free hand is creating a bad blood among citizens, said Khurram Raza, a resident of Faisal Town. He said he was a regular user of Facebook and recently saw many controversial posts on various groups especially of colleges and universities. He said he had seen friends fighting and abusing each other online over such posts. Many other citizens also appealed to the government to take strict action against the people who with malicious intents initiated controversial posts. They said administrators of different Facebook groups and pages should also play a vigilant role and remove such posts, which are disrupting religious harmony.