Facebook’s parent company Meta has finally unblocked Indian Army XV Corps’ (Chinar Corps) official Instagram and Facebook handles today. Both the accounts had remained blocked since January 28 without any substantial reason.
Army officials in a statement announced that the Instagram account of the Srinagar-based Chinar Corps has been activated today after being suspended for more than a week.
On February 8, a senior official on this matter stated that this matter had been taken up with the authorities concerned in Facebook, but so far there has been no response from their side. In addition to this, when the accounts faced this instant blockage, officials wrote to Facebook immediately after but the issue is yet to be resolved, the officials said.
Sources called this abrupt blockage a part of information warfare, stating that this has happened earlier as well – some social media accounts were blocked last year for a few days. Hinting at Pakistan, they said sometimes the pages might be reported by a large group of people as part of a “coordinated” campaign, which can result in the page being suspended.
It appears to be a “coordinated campaign”, an official said, as there was no unusual activity.
It is worth mentioning that, it is in company policy of the two social media websites to remove a page if it does not follow the rules and regulations or if people report about it. On these regulations, the sources close to Amry clarified that neither Facebook nor Instagram had mentioned any specific post by Chinar Corps that violated their rules.
The Facebook handle @ChinarCorpsIA had over 24,000 followers, and over 23,000 likes, and is even tagged as a “government organisation”. The Instagram account had around 43,300 followers and is named ChinarCorpsIA
According to the officials, content on these two platforms was similar to what they post on Twitter and was in line with how official content is shared. They also added that before being uploaded, every post are rectified closely and the official handles are careful that nothing objectionable is shared from these handles.
XV Corps, or 15 Corps, also known as Chinar Corps, is a Corps sized unit of the Indian Army presently based in Srinagar. The Corps is responsible for military operations in the Kashmir Valley. Until now, It has participated in all military conflicts with Pakistan and China.
