‘For telling the truth’: Taslima Nasreen alleges her Facebook account banned for 7 days

Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen said on Monday that her account on Facebook has been banned "again for 7 days for telling the truth". "Facebook has banned me for writing Islamists destroyed Bangladeshi Hindu houses & temples believing that Hindus placed Quran on Hanuman's thigh. But when it was revealed that Iqbal Hossain did that, not the Hindus, Islamists were silent, said and did nothing against Iqbal…'" Taslima Nasreen said in a post on Twitter.

This is not the first time the author's account has been barred by Facebook. Before this, Nasreen alleged on March 16 this year that Facebook barred her from using the platform for 24 hours.

"#Facebook banned me for 24 hrs. My crime was I liked the decision of Aarong, a Bangladeshi handicrafts store, for not hiring a Jihadi who refused to follow the rules of Aarong, to shave off his beard to work as a salesman. Islamists have been protesting against Aarong," she tweeted.

The author's Facebook account was also allegedly disabled by the social media company in 2015.

Facebook has said an account will be banned if anybody breaches its "hate speech" policy. "We define hate speech as a direct attack against people - rather than concepts or institutions - on the basis of what we call protected characteristics: race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease," according to Facebook's policy.

Facebook has said that it defines attacks as "violent or dehumanising speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, disgust or dismissal, cursing and calls for exclusion or segregation."

"We also prohibit the use of harmful stereotypes, which we define as dehumanising comparisons that have historically been used to attack, intimidate or exclude specific groups, and that are often linked with offline violence," it has said.

On March 17, Taslima Nasreen claimed that the Bangladeshi governments banned her books.

"Governments ban my books, jihadists burn my books and threat booksellers not to sell my books. I've got only one platform to express my views in Bengali, that is #fb. But whenever I use my freedom to write on fb freely for my readers, fb bans me. No free-speech for freethinkers," she tweeted.

Nasreen, who rose to fame for her powerful works on women oppression, such as Lajja (Shame) and her fearless criticism of religion, left Bangladesh in 1994 in the wake of death threat by fundamentalist outfits for her alleged anti-Islamic views. She has been living in exile since then and lives in New Delhi.