My take on the Facebook Boycott

As you might be knowing that today we, the facebook muslim community have arranged an organised protest / boycott of facebook for not removing pages that we find offensive. This move has been taken on the page ‘Everybody draw Muhammad (S.A.W) on 20th May’.
This page was reported as abuse classified under hate speech on the first sight by almost any practising muslim who has respect for Islam, including me. We have been reporting this page since 2 weeks to be removed from facebook.
Despite thousands of reports from muslims and even some non-muslims who believed that this was hate speech against Islam, facebook took no action on this matter. That is when we, the facebook muslim community decided to boycott facebook on 20th May to show our strength and our disapproval of the highly offensive act of facebook by not removing those pages.
I am very grateful to the government of Pakistan and the high court who took this a step forward. Instead of us facebook users reminding each other to not use facebook on 20th May. The lahore high court decided to pass a ban on facebook following this incident till the date of 31st May pending action from facebook regarding all of those pages.
All internet service providers in Pakistan were notified on this and day before yesterday, facebook was completely blocked by all ISPs. This is the email I received from my ISP:

Dear Valued Customer,
Micronet has blocked access to www.facebook.com
in compliance with orders of Lahore High Court passed today.
Facebook has been holding a competition to draw caricatures
of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and has not removed the
objectionable hate materials despite thousands of emails
from Pakistani facebook community.
This access would remain block till 31 May 2010 or further
orders by the Lahore High Court.
Best Regards

I hold high gratitude for the high court for taking this step. Muslims have been representing a high proportion of the internet users since it’s very start contributing to almost more than 45% of facebook’s users. We are definitely a majority and we cannot have our interests and beliefs insulted like that.
Muslims have been contributing to the internet in all forms (me and my blog is an example) and we are a main reason why facebook is making a lot of money. Losing all the muslim users means losing approximately 45% of your revenue (considering the average revenue per facebook user.
Moreover, facebook is a large business corporation. Any rational business would create about even the slightest change in their revenues while 45% is big enough to bring it down from the peak to the bottom.
I will prove this when I write another post about this in a few days where I will show the loss of facebook’s internet users and possibly revenue generation for them. It will definitely teach facebook a big lesson.

Where this started?

This is the first thing that I researched when I took a notice of this highly offensive page and the event.
A cartoonist, molly norris, did not like the censorship given to a scene in an episode of south park which depicted Prohpet Muhammad (PBUH). She believed that this provided a wrong image to the people of USA.
She decided to give birth to the idea of this day be as a call to freedom of speech and protest against the censorship that was given. This led to the facebook page being created and the whole thing going viral.
It was further ignited from a youtube video by a user by the name of ‘thunderf00t’. This user posted a video by the name of ‘Islam Fail’. This was deemed as extremely offensive by all of the muslim community on youtube. The responses were obvious to be harsh. Then this user went on to support 20th May as a ‘Everybody draw Muhammad (S.A.W) day’. (Nauzubillah)
This originated the whole thing and has resulted in a complete ban on youtube in Pakistan as well as that video had also been reported as offensive on no subsequent action was taken on that matter.
I have also removed the link to my blog’s fan page on facebook. I wouldn’t want to use facebook again until facebook takes some kind of an action on this matter, because if we use facebook, we want our interests to be protected.
I was much busy with my studies, but this is a post that I just had to put on the blog because I couldn’t really keep this inside. This is a thing that everyone should know, whether they’re a muslim or a non-muslim.
If you’re a christian, jew, hindu or even an atheist. Think about this with an open mind and think for yourself whether or not this is a massacre on the name of humanity. Better classified as ‘genocide’ by many. If highly offending the believers of a religion and insulting it is classified as ‘freedom of speech’ by the big internet websites, then we refuse to ever use them again.