April 09, 2020, Kathmandu, Nepal
Today a post was made from Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers’ official Facebook Page with username @OPMCMNP saying, “The meeting of the high-level committee today decided to open the exit route from Kathmandu valley tomorrow and the next day, keeping in view the residents seeking an exit from Kathmandu Valley due to lockdown.”
After some time, the post was updated by adding, ”The decision to reopen Kathmandu Valley route tomorrow and the next day has been withdrawn as local-level governments have not approved.“
Then, there started the criticism of negligence in the flow of information by a sensitive body like the Prime Minister’s Office. Almost all the people who were excited due to the post were then criticizing the act. The wall of Facebook is full of criticism.
Later on, Ishwor Pokhrel, deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister denied the decision by posting a post on his Facebook page.
Home Ministry also issued a statement saying no any decision was made toopen the exit route from Kathmandu valley tomorrow and the next day.
After some time of the update of post,suddenly the verified Facebook page of the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers disappeared from Facebook.
So, what do people say about the page disappearance?
Since the page is disappeared, people are making different assumptions about the page. Some people are saying that the Prime Minister Office’s Facebook is hacked. They say the hacker deleted the page after publishing the undecided news. While some people are saying admins deleted the page intentionally to cover the controversial issue of post update, there are other people who say that the page just unpublished.
Is the Facebook Page of Prime Minister’s Office really hacked?
Well, we can’t be sure that the Facebook Page of Prime Minister Office is hacked. If the page was hacked, I mean another person had got admin access too, he can’t delete the page right now. It takes 14 days to delete a Facebook page after scheduling for deletion.
If anyone got the admin access and scheduled it for deletion too, as a verified government page, it’ll definitely be recovered within these 14 days. Facebook gives better support to verified pages and much better support to government pages.
If the page was hacked, we’d have got official information regarding it after the issue was spread in the social media.
So, what happened to the Facebook Page of PMO Nepal?
Whatever might have happened, currently the page is just unpublished. If a person has scheduled for its deletion too, he has done be unpublishing it.The page might have been unpublished by the admin to act like the post was never posted and updated.
To know what happened actually, we all must wait for the official statement from the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministersregarding the page disappearance issue.