Unrealistic Facebook ban

A letter issued by the cabinet division stating students' and young peoples' studies are being hampered by excess time spent on social media network Facebook has predictably run into a storm of protest as hundreds of thousands use it for both leisure and other purposes. It is like cutting off the head to cure the headache. The response from Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has been one of pragmatism. Indeed, BTRC has pointed out rightly that such a ban will prove futile as there are applications like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that work their way around any attempted ban by the government. The last time the government banned Facebook, its messenger, Viber and Whatsapp for 22 days was in 2015 on national security grounds. Thankfully the government has backtracked from this unrealistic step. The ban would have caused a lot of legitimate problems. There are scores of businesses which use Facebook's large user base in Bangladesh to promote and indeed, sell their products. The last ban cost these businesses millions in lost revenue.

Our submission to the government is, do not arrogate the task of parenting to yourself. By all means launch necessary programmes for parental awareness. There are tools that allow parents or guardians to control computers accessed by children. These are readily available that restrict usage of some sites and it is here that the issues of unauthorised usage by children can be controlled. So instead of a blanket ban for six hours, efforts should be made for parents to take responsibility on how technology is used in their homes. Lastly, we should remember that it is not only children who use voice applications or Facebook; millions of our expatriate workers toiling in foreign lands keep in touch with family at home using these software, so any ban would hurt them also. We urge the government to take these into consideration before embarking on such bans in the future which will inevitably fail, but not before causing a lot of misery to a lot of people.