Last week, San Francisco Bay Area community members mailed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over 250 bottles of Purell, to help remove bloodstains left behind from shaking hands with Narendra Modi.

See the photos online at ZuckWashYourHands.com

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As part of the #ModiFail campaign, the Alliance for Justice and Accountability (AJA) is using billboards to raise public awareness about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his administration’s attacks on personal freedoms and human rights in India. AJA hopes this series of billboards in the San Francisco Bay Area will inform the American people that Modi’s upcoming Silicon Valley PR tour is being used as an excuse to whitewash his dismal record as Prime Minister, and before that, Chief Minister of Gujarat.

The billboards are visible from I-580 in Oakland, I-280 in Daly City, Highway 92 in Hayward, Highway 84 in Newark, I-880 in Newark, I-880 in Milpitas, and Highway 101 in Santa Clara.

The billboard highlights ModiFail.com, the AJA’s online report card highlighting the facts behind some of Narendra Modi’s most egregious failures during his 16 months in office as Prime Minister.

India’s celebrated values of pluralism and tolerance are under severe attack since Mr. Modi assumed office as Prime Minister. According to the Modi government’s sources, attacks against religious minorities are up 25% since last year. His own ministers are engaged in a malicious hate campaign against Christians and Muslims.

Narendra Modi speaks eloquently of Digital India, but individuals posting comments against Modi or his peers on Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media sites have repeatedly faced arrest; when the Indian Supreme Court struck down the hated “Facebook arrest” law, the Modi government expressed interest in passing replacement censorship legislation to skirt the ban. The Modi government has been particularly vicious in its attacks on free speech, as it increasingly equates dissent, even in the form of social media posts, with sedition and “waging war against the state.”

The Alliance for Justice and Accountability (AJA) is a diverse coalition led by progressive Indian American communities. AJA members work for pluralism, civil rights, religious freedom, women’s rights, LGBTQ equality, and environmental justice in India and beyond.

LA Times journalist Shashank Bengali writes a variety of stories on South Asia, including a very positive recent article on Prime Minister Modi’s upcoming trip to Silicon Valley. But when he published a new story critical of the Modi administration, his story was targeted for online censorship.

His new Los Angeles Times story, “India police officers feel targeted for offering evidence against prime minister”, is a damning look at the attacks faced by whistleblowers against Narendra Modi:

“One police official saw his promising career flatline and was dogged by minor misconduct charges until he took early retirement this year. Another endured a long suspension before being fired last month, but not before a sex video surfaced that purported to show him with a mistress. (Apart from the receding hairline and healthy mustache, his wife said, he looked nothing like the man on screen.) A third faces a possible inquiry into decade-old charges of disclosing sensitive information. It could cost him his pension. The three former officials say they have been targeted for offering evidence potentially damaging to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, in a protracted investigation into one of India’s worst bouts of religious violence in recent decades.” (source)

But when you try to share the story on Facebook, it gets flagged as unsafe content, forcing the user to complete a CAPTCHA:

But it’s even harder to click on the story. When you try to click on a link to the story, Facebook tries to warn users that this may be dangerous:

This censorship on Facebook may be the result of Narendra Modi partisans — either paid or unpaid — repeatedly clicking “report as spam/virus” on the story, forcing Facebook’s algorithms to treat it as dangerous content.

It’s outrageous for Facebook to be used a tool of censorship to bolster Narendra Modi’s PR, preventing American readers from reading an American newspaper article via an American social network.

Try sharing the link http://latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-india-modi-whistleblower-20150920-story.html for yourself to see if this is still happening.