The (organization) secretary-general of Congress, KC Venugopal, wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Saturday for the second time in a month, asking what action was being taken regarding repeated allegations that the India unit of the Global social media giant is biased towards the ruling BJP.
The congressional letter to Zuckerberg came about an article in Time magazine, which the opposition party said “revealed” more information and “evidence of biases and a quid pro quo relationship” of Facebook India with him. Bharatiya Janata Party.
“Congress and Rahul Gandhi think that everyone else besides themselves is responsible for their successive electoral defeats. They must realize that the people have no faith in Congress or in Rahul Gandhi’s lackluster and mediocre leadership. This is not about a social media company, but about people from India who have rejected them, “Malviya said.
Tagging the Time magazine report, Congressional Leader Rahul Gandhi claimed in a tweet exposing the “WhatsApp-BJP nexus.”
“Used by the Indians 40 Cr, WhatsApp also wants to be used to make payments for which the approval of the Government of Modi is needed. Therefore, BJP has control over WhatsApp,” he claimed without giving further details.
The popular WhatsApp messaging app is also owned by Facebook.
In the congressional letter to the Facebook CEO, Malviya said that these days everyone in Congress, from Manish Tewari to KC Venugopal, is writing letters to the social media firm.
“Perhaps they should find out who should be taken seriously before reminding them that it was they who were dealing with Cambridge Analytica to manipulate the 2019 general election,” said the BJP leader.
A report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month had raised similar allegations, which were strongly rejected by both Facebook and the BJP.
After the controversy broke out, the BJP had attacked Congress over the opposition party’s accusations, saying that people whose political base has “shrunk like anything else” seek to dominate the discourse on these platforms while claiming that everyone, regardless of their ideology, they have the right to air their views there.
The party’s leader, Ravi Shankar Prasad, had said that former congressional president Rahul Gandhi believes that any organization that does not function to its liking is operating under pressure from the BJP and the RSS.
Malviya had also cited cases of bias by certain Facebook officials against the ruling party and had even reported it to the social media giant.
Facebook had previously said that the company’s social media platform bans Hate speech and content that incites violence, adding that these policies apply globally regardless of political affiliation.
However, Facebook, which counts India among its largest markets globally, acknowledged that “there is more to do.”
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