London, Apr. 23 : Facebook has become a breeding ground for racists and far-right extremists, according to immigrant leaders and anti-racism campaigners, who believe the site''s owners are not doing enough to clamp down on cyber hate.

More than 200 million people around the world belong to the social networking site, which attracts thousands of new members every day.

According to The Independent, the Federation of Poles in Great Britain has become so disturbed by some of the content online that it has written a letter to Facebook''s owner Mark Zuckerburg, calling on him to close down an anti-Polish group where one member said Polish people should be thrown "down the well".

Jan Mokrzycki, a spokesman for the federation, said: "Generally we try not to react against every inflammatory gesture against Polish people, but the language within the website was so rude and racist that we felt like we had no choice."

The sheer size of Facebook''s online community makes monitoring extremists difficult. But a number of groups calling on Britain to throw out, and even kill, foreign nationals have been operating freely for months.

A group called "People hate Pakis" boasts more than 80 members and claims to have been set up by "rebels" from Bradford, where inter-racial tension remains a major problem.

A second group calling itself "Get all the Paki''s [sic] out of England" has more than 140 members, many of whom use racist language which is illegal under laws prohibiting incitement to racial hatred.

Facebook declined to comment yesterday. (ANI)