Hundreds of prominent users, mainly from India, are protesting on Quora by deactivating their accounts against the platform’s bias against right wing.
Several users of the popular question-and-answer social platform Quora have deactivated their accounts in a protest against the platform’s bias against the right wing.
It all started when a user Deepak Mehta made posts criticizing the narrative of ‘Hindu terrorism’ that was being built up by some users on the platform. The matter of ‘Hindu terrorism’ is a sensitive political issue in India majorly pushed by leftists in order to blame Hindus for terrorism in order to appease non-Hindus.
Deepak had been writing on Quora since 2012 and is known for writing quality and fact-backed answers. He has won Quora’s ‘Top Writer Award’—a virtual title given by Quora to their best writers—five times and written over 3,600 answers on the platform.
Quora generates its revenue by stacking advertisements between such answers written by its users. They also distribute their users’ answers to media companies and organisations for publishing.
Deepak’s followers first ran petitions in order to get his account unbanned. When Quora moderation decided not to unban him despite the petitions, many users started deactivating their accounts.
Quora’s most followed person, Balaji Viswanathan deactivated his account and made a post stating that his profile will remain deactivated for a week. This led to many prominent users like Supreme Court advocate and ex-IPS officer, Ashok Dhamija, Tejasvita Apte, Aman Khanna and many others deactivating their accounts.
This also adds fuel to the debate of leading social media platforms to be globally censoring conservative voices. Platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Google have been found to be censoring content and banning users on the basis of their political stances.
Report by Ranjeni Singh, Deputy Editor, Times of India (Times Group)
