Facebook has disabled an online group that rallies people against the BJP and had spearheaded an anti-BJP campaign by civil society in the run-up to the Bengal Assembly polls.

The “No Vote to BJP” Facebook group has over 33,000 members. Credited with playing a key role in the BJP’s crushing Assembly election defeat, the campaign has stayed active, both online and offline, after the polls.

“Your group has been disabled because it doesn’t follow our community standards on . An admin has requested that we review this decision and we’ll send you an update soon,” read a message on the group’s profile, visible only to the administrators.

There’s a space between “on” and the full stop that follows at the end of the incomplete first sentence, as though an undecided writer had left room for an appropriate word to be put in later.

Members alleged that the group was disabled around Wednesday-Thursday midnight, with the administrators receiving the notification that said the group had not followed Facebook “community standards”.

Till Thursday night, there had been no update from Facebook, the administrators said.

A Facebook spokesperson refused comment when The Telegraph sought a reaction. An email from this newspaper had not brought any response till Thursday night.

Sources in the company said “investigating such a complaint takes time and has to go through a process that involves multiple teams”.

Among the members of the disabled group are the young actors who had conceived the music video, Nijeder Mawte Nijeder Gaan, that assailed intolerance and bigotry and made a splash ahead of the Bengal elections.

Facebook’s move has triggered a flurry of protests on social media, with messages pasted on the pages of individual users as well as on the page of the No Vote to BJP campaign, which is still operative.

“Shame on FB. You are like BJP,” a comment said. Many others said the campaign would go on.

“The group admins are entitled to know on what basis the suspension came. How did the group violate Facebook’s community standards? What are these standards? It seems as if the Facebook community standards align with the BJP standards,” said Sabyasachi Mukherjee, one of the group administrators.

“Just before getting the notification of disablement, group admins got notifications regarding the deletion of several posts of the group on the ground of community standards violation,” he added.

“Although we are not able to see the deleted posts now, it can be anticipated that those were posts regarding political programmes organised by the group. As the name suggests, this group was clearly political and endorsed a specific campaign.”

While the campaign had organised meetings, performed skits, distributed pamphlets and put up posters asking people not to vote for the BJP, it did not ask them to vote for any particular party.

“We strongly suspect that complaints from Facebook users who are BJP supporters and Right-wing sympathisers have had a role in this,” Mukherjee said.

Facebook, which counts India among its largest markets with over 300 million users, has been repeatedly accused of following content policies that favoured the ruling BJP.

In August 2020, a report in The Wall Street Journal alleged that Facebook — the world’s largest social media company and the owner of WhatsApp, the most popular social messaging app in India — had ignored hate speech by BJP leaders.

The report had added that in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Ankhi Das, Facebook’s then public policy director for India, South and Central Asia, had kept it under wraps that Facebook had deleted fake news pages linked to the BJP.

Das, who allegedly opposed the blocking of Right-wing hate content, quit the company in October last year.

A member of the No Vote to BJP group said: “Aggressive comments from Right-wing sympathisers and fake posts abound on Facebook. The people behind them go scot-free but our voices get muffled.”

Netizens and activists opposed to the BJP alleged that the disablement was not a one-off.

Another group called the No NRC Movement — formed to “protest the Centre’s new citizenship thrust and expose and resist fascist forces” — was disabled by Facebook multiple times before and during the Bengal elections.

“The No NRC Movement was disabled at least thrice on the same ground,” said Sagar Lahiri, an administrator of the group.

“Each time, it was restored after many people protested on Facebook about the arbitrary action. The last time, the group was disabled for close to a month from the middle of May.”

Lahiri added: “The curbs were lifted as Facebook could not provide a specific reason for disabling the group.”