Bangladeshi government unbans Facebook

Published Jun 08 2010, 07:00 AM by Arafat Kazi

In 2009, the government of Bangladesh started a project called Digital Bangladesh. Its premise was simple: that by 2021, Bangladesh (a third world country slightly smaller than Iowa, where cricket, poverty, and heavy metal are the national pastimes) would have countrywide 3G access (in 2021, mind you) and all universities across the land would have internet, email, and licensed copies of Netscape Navigator.

Unfortunately, soon after the Digital Bangladesh declaration, someone uploaded top secret footage of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina meeting army officers. The government's reaction was to block nationwide access to YouTube. A few months down the line, the Bangladeshi government discovered that the internet contained pornography, and they decided to take a stand. So they banned 84 porn sites and taught the world's erotic artists a lesson. This is fact.

Most recently, the prime minister discovered that there are satirical images of her on Facebook. So Facebook was banned as well. Soon after the ban, there was a fire that killed 119 people. The government then decided to unban Facebook.

Jahangir Jackson Titu, the vice chairman of the Digital Bangladesh Task Force, said: "We have decided to take this step so that the burn victims who are still alive can post status updates with disappointed emoticons such as ‘;-(' and let their friends and family know of the horrible injuries and deaths that they have suffered. We are also putting together a task force so that we can contact Facebook authorities and change the 'Relationship status' of the 119 dead people to 'Single' since, being dead, they are necessarily not married or in a relationship -- although, depending on their theological beliefs, their situation could described as 'It's complicated.' "

(Note: this quote is made up.)

Here is a hilarious banner that Bangladeshi ad agency Bitopi Leo Burnett designed for Nando's Chicken. It deals with the upper middle class Bangladeshi's frustration at not having access to the latest in Western technology.