Claiming that hundreds of Facebook and WhatsApp accounts of Trinamool party supporters were banned online, the party has written to the social media giant urging “immediate action.” Noting that the account ban comes months before elections in the state, Trinamool said it points to a link between “Facebook and the BJP.”
“I want to draw your attention to the removal of hundreds of pages and accounts of Trinamool Congressional supporters on both Facebook and WhatsApp for ‘violations of community standards.’ In the run-up to the previously announced founding day event of Trinamool Chhatra Parishad (TMCP), the student wing of All India’s Trinamool Congress, on August 28, numerous Facebook and WhatsApp accounts were banned, ”wrote Derek O ‘Brien. TMC leader Rajya Sabha, in a letter to Facebook on August 31.
The MP, in his letter, also attached a list of the blocked accounts and numbers and urged Facebook to take immediate action and corrective measures.
In another letter to the company, O’Brien alleged that the event before the polls suggested a link between the ruling party in the Center and the BJP.
“With the election in the Indian state of West Bengal only a few months away, the recent blocking of his company’s Facebook pages and accounts in Bengal also points to a link between Facebook and the BJP. There is now enough material in the public domain, including internal memoranda from Facebook’s top management, to corroborate the bias, ”O’Brien wrote in the second letter.
On September 1, Union Minister Ravi Shankhar Prasad also sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg raising the issue of freedom of expression, accusing it of being the “last tool” used by vested interests to create “internal divisions and social unrest”.
This comes days after TMC’s top lawmaker Mahua Moitra raised questions about hateful posts. The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook did not apply its hate speech rules to some BJP leaders. The BJP and Congress had also engaged in a war of words on the issue.
Earlier, Congress wrote to Facebook, accusing its Indian team of “interfering” with the country’s electoral democracy and demanding an investigation. Congress and the CPI (M) had even demanded an investigation by a Joint Parliamentary Committee into the charges against Facebook.
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