LONDON — Facebook said on Thursday it helped 175 Afghans, including staff from the social media giant, flee from Afghanistan to Mexico.
Earlier this week, the Mexican government confirmed the arrival of activists and independent journalists along with their families, which included 75 children, to Mexico City.
A Facebook spokesperson said, “In the process of assisting Facebook employees and close partners leave Afghanistan, we joined an effort to help a group of journalists and their families who were in grave danger.”
“Thanks to the leadership of the Mexican government and the support of the UAE in providing the initial landing, the journalists have been welcomed in Mexico.”
This group is reportedly the fourth to arrive in Mexico from Afghanistan on humanitarian grounds since the Taliban took over the country in August this year.
Three previous flights from Afghanistan to Mexico over the past week included Afghan media workers from prominent US-based newspapers.
The Mexican government said the latest group “is made up of social media workers, activists, and independent journalists and their families.”
Facebook has ramped up its effort to thwart the increasing growth of Taliban content on the social media platform and also added an additional privacy feature for users in Afghanistan.
The latest measure includes a one-click tool for people in Afghanistan that allows them to lock their accounts. The privacy setting would prevent others who are not their friends from downloading or sharing their profile photos or seeing posts on their timeline.
Additional tools include a permanent ban of Taliban content from its platforms as the American multinational technology company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., considers the group to be a terrorist organisation.
To achieve that, Facebook assigned a team of Afghan experts, who are native Dari and Pashto speakers and have knowledge of local context, to monitor and remove Taliban-linked content from the platform.
