The man, identified by police as Luzian Andrin Zgraggen, was detained on Saturday after being reported over an Instagram post in which he allegedly used repeated expletives to refer to Nyepi, Bali police spokesman Ariasandy said in a statement late Sunday.

Zgraggen is being investigated for spreading hate speech online, an offence under Indonesia’s updated criminal code that carries a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment.

Police said they would confiscate his iPhone as part of the inquiry and question witnesses.Ariasandy did not specify the suspect’s age, in line with common Indonesian practice where some officials use a single name.

Nyepi, observed last Thursday on the island of Bali, is a key religious observance in the Hindu-majority region. The day requires residents and visitors to remain indoors for 24 hours for self-reflection, with work, travel, entertainment and even the use of electricity largely halted.

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, has stepped up enforcement against behavior deemed offensive or unlawful by foreign visitors.

Bali, a major tourism destination attracting millions of international tourists annually, has seen a series of high-profile incidents involving foreigners in recent months.Last week, authorities arrested two French nationals and an Italian on allegations of producing and distributing pornography, which is prohibited under Indonesian law.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper revoked his travel permission after The Telegraph revealed his upcoming tour of London, Manchester, and Birmingham, titled “Waking the Dead – Returning from the Darkness.” The Home Office concluded his presence was “not conducive to the public good,” citing concerns over public safety and social cohesion.

“Sheikh Farooq will not be permitted to enter the UK,” a Home Office spokesperson confirmed. “Our priority remains maintaining the safety and security of the UK and our communities. We have robust safeguards in place to prevent entry of individuals who seek to sow hatred and division.”

Airlines have reportedly been instructed not to allow Sheikh Farooq to board flights to the UK.

Preacher Under Fire for Comments on Slavery and Women

Sheikh Farooq, who is based in San Diego and affiliated with the One Message Foundation, stirred widespread condemnation after a video surfaced in which he claimed that sexual relations with female slaves captured in war were permissible under Islamic law.

Explaining his view in the video, he said: “Those taken under war as captives… you’re now going to support and keep in your house… they are like a wife… if Allah made it halal, then it’s not sinning, that is not adultery.”

His comments have drawn sharp criticism from human rights advocates, secular organizations, and Muslim community leaders alike.

Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Faith Matters, condemned the preacher’s statements as “abhorrent,” adding, “Saying that sex with slaves is permissible sends a barbaric message to people. We’ve seen what groups like ISIS did to Yazidi women. Such views should not find a platform in the UK.”

Stephen Evans, chief executive of the National Secular Society, said: “Any charity hosting a speaker who condones sexual slavery should have its charitable status seriously reviewed. Promoting misogyny undermines public benefit and social harmony.”

Robert Jenrick, Shadow Justice Secretary, had earlier called on the government to prevent the preacher’s entry. “This man should never step foot on UK soil. His visa must be revoked immediately,” he stated. “Islamists spreading hate and sowing division are not welcome here.”

Sheikh Farooq previously toured parts of the UK last month, delivering lectures that also raised concerns. He has made remarks predicting the Islamization of Europe, the US, and Russia, saying, “The future is ours… every nightmare of a Muslim Europe will come true.” He urged Muslims to “never apologize” or “compromise” their faith.

In another appearance in Leicester, he made comments perceived as anti-Semitic, adding to the backlash.

Sheikh Farooq was set to appear alongside Ustadh Imran ibn Mansur, a social media figure who brands himself a Muslim entrepreneur. Mr. Mansur has shared videos advising Muslim women to create anonymous online content and has made controversial statements about women wearing perfume, calling them “fornicatresses.”

The UK government’s move reflects a broader effort to counter extremist ideologies, particularly those that incite hatred or undermine democratic values. The decision signals zero tolerance for individuals espousing regressive or inflammatory views, regardless of religious affiliation.

The ban underscores Britain’s commitment to ensuring that religious discourse does not become a platform for misogyny, antisemitism, or hate speech cloaked in theological justifications.

Disinformation is an organised and carefully mined operation here.

BBC News published a featured column about the rise of disinformation campaigns in India, which has eventually become a difficult and tedious task for the social media giants like Facebook to handle.

Below is the entire column published verbatim:

The researcher’s report was part of a cache of internal documents called The Facebook Papers, recently obtained by New York Times and other US publications. They show the social media giant struggling to tame the avalanche of fake news, hate speech, and inflammatory content -“celebrations of violence”, among other things – out of India, the network’s biggest market.

This was made worse, reported the New York Times, by failure to deploy enough resources in India’s 22 officially recognised languages and a lack of cultural sensitivity.

A Facebook spokesperson told me that the findings had led the company to undertake a “deeper, more rigorous analysis” of its recommendation systems in India and contributed to “product changes to improve them”. 

So, is a lack of resources hobbling efforts by Facebook to fight fake news and inflammatory material in India? Facebook has partnered locally with 10 fact-checking organisations. Items flagged across the social network are fact-checked in English and 11 other Indian languages, making it one of the largest networks after the US.

But the reality is more complex. Fact-checking organisations working with Facebook in India say they cross-check and tag suspicious news and posts flagged by users. The network is then expected to suppress the distribution of such posts. 

“We really do not have any moral or legal authority on what Facebook does after we tag a news or a post,” a senior official of a fact-checking organisation told me.

Also, fact-checking is only one part of Facebook’s efforts at countering misinformation. The problem in India is much bigger: hate speech is rife, bots and fake accounts linked to India’s political parties and leaders abound, and user pages and large groups brim with inflammatory material targeting Muslims and other minorities. Disinformation is an organised and carefully mined operation here. Elections and “events” like natural calamities and the coronavirus pandemic usually trigger fake news outbreaks.

Also, the fact that Facebook does not fact check opinion and speech posted by politicians on grounds of “free expression and respect for the democratic process” is not always helpful. “A large part of the misinformation on social media in India is generated by politicians of the ruling party. They have the largest clout, but Facebook doesn’t fact-check them,” says Pratik Sinha, co-founder of Alt News, an independent fact-checking site.

So, the latest revelations do not come as a surprise to most fact-checkers and rights activists in India. “We have known this all along. No social media platform is above blame,” says Mr Sinha. 

With a surfeit of hate speech, trolling and attacks on minorities and women, Indian Twitter is a polarised and dark place. WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging service, remains the largest carrier of fake news and hoaxes in its biggest market. YouTube, owned by Google, hosts a lot of fake news and controversial content, but doesn’t attract the same amount of attention. For example there were live videos, up to 12 hours long, on the site that fanned conspiracy theories about the death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput last year. (The police later ruled that Rajput died by suicide.)

The problem with Facebook lies elsewhere. With 340 million users, India is its biggest market. It is a general purpose social media platform which offers users individual pages and to form groups. “The wide range of features make it more vulnerable to all kinds of misinformation and hate speech,” says Mr Sinha. 

The overwhelming bulk of hate speech and misinformation on the social network are expected to be captured by its internal AI engines and content moderators all over the world. Facebook claims to have spent more than $13bn and hired more than 40,000 people in teams and technology around the world on safety and security issues since 2016. More than 15,000 people review content in more than 70 languages, including 20 Indian languages, a spokesperson told me. 

When users report hate speech, automated “classifiers” – a database created by humans which annotates different kinds of speeches – vet them before selected ones reach human moderators, which are often third-party contractors. “If these classifiers were good enough they would catch a lot more hate speech, with fewer false positives. But they clearly aren’t,” says Mr Sinha. 

A Facebook spokesperson told that the firm had “invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali”. 

“As a result, we’ve reduced the amount of hate speech that people see by half this year. Today, it’s down to 0.05%. Hate speech against marginalised groups, including Muslims, is on the rise globally. So we are improving enforcement and are committed to updating our policies as hate speech evolves online,” the spokesperson said. 

Then there are allegations that Facebook favours the governing party. A series of articles by journalists Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in 2018 wrote about the platform’s “dominant position in India with more than a little help from friends of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP”, among other things. (The articles also looked at the Congress party’s own “relations with Facebook”.) “A business model predicated on virality makes Facebook an ally of ruling governments,” says Mr Guha Thakurta, co-author of The Real Face of Facebook in India.

Many believe a large part of the blame must broadly lie with the social network’s algorithms which decide what to show up when you search for a subject, and pushes users to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages. 

Alan Rusbridger, a journalist and member of Facebook’s oversight board, has said the board will have to “get to grips” with the perception of people who believe that “the algorithms reward emotional content that polarises communities because that makes it more addictive”. In other words, the network’s algorithms allow “fringe content to reach the mainstream”, as Roddy Lindsay, a former data scientist at Facebook, says.

“This ensures that these feeds will continue promoting the most titillating, inflammatory content, and it creates an impossible task for content moderators, who struggle to police problematic viral content in hundreds of languages, countries and political contexts,” notes Mr Lindsay.

In the end, as Frances Haugen, the Facebook product-manager-turned-whistleblower, says: “We should have software that is human-scaled, where humans have conversations together, not computers facilitating who we get to hear from.”