Facebook Banned In Bangladesh

The government of Bangladesh temporarily blocked access to Facebook on Saturday. The highly popular social network site was shut down at around 7:00 pm (local time) after the arrest of a youth in connection with uploading satiric images of some politicians including the prime minister and the leader of the opposition.
Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) detained Mahbub Alam Rodin (30) at Ranking Street in the Wari area of the capital, Dhaka early Saturday on charge of posting 'offensive' cartoons on government high-ups and making 'derogatory' comments about them on Facebook, the elite force said.
Even though the government did not offer any official statement, local media quoted the state-run Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission (BTRC) saying that the posting of some anti-religious and pornographic links by users across the globe are among the reasons for restricting the access.
"The access to facebook will resume when the data operators find a way to block such anti-social content," a high official of BTRC told the Daily Star, a local newspaper.
The BTRC earlier asked Mango Telecom and Bangladesh Telecommunication Company Limited, the two international Internet gateways, to find out a way to block anti-social contents posted by facebook users.
On Friday, three Islamic political parties--Islami Oikya Jote, Islami Andolan and Khelafat Andolan-- demanded immediate ban on Facebook for a recent campaign by some users inviting people to draw images of Prophet Hazrat Mohammad (SM).
Pakistan has recently banned facebook.
The social networking site has over 500 million users worldwide, with over 875,000 of them in Bangladesh.