Head of Facebook Public Policy in India, Ankhi Das (File photo)
NEW DELHI: A Wall Street Journal report states that one day before the BJP swept to victory in the 2014 general election, Facebook head of public policy in India, Ankhi das, sent an internal message to the company’s employees writing: “We lit a fire at your social media campaign and the rest is, of course, history. “Facebook, however, said the posts were taken” out of context. ”
Das, who has been in the midst of a political storm for allegedly “favoring” the ruling dispensation, had also “belittled” the BJP’s main rival, Congress. “It took 30 years of grassroots work to finally rid India of state socialism,” he wrote of the party’s defeat. the WSJ he examined messages posted to an internal group between 2012 and 2014. In one of them, he praised the prime minister as the “strong man” who had broken the control of the old ruling party.
Facebook said Das’s posts do not show inappropriate bias. “These posts are taken out of context and do not represent the full scope of Facebook’s efforts to support the use of our platform by parties across the Indian political spectrum,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told WSJ.
According to the WSJ report, Facebook also “refused to act after discovering that the BJP was circumventing its requirements for political advertising transparency.” Facebook rules require advertisers to verify their identities and reveal them to users. But in addition to buying Facebook ads in its own name, BJP was also found to have “spent hundreds of thousands of dollars through newly created organizations that did not reveal the role of the party.” Facebook, however, did not remove the pages or flag the ads. “Instead, he raised the matter privately with the BJP, according to former employees in both India and the United States, where the decision was discussed,” the article says.
Regarding the violation of political advertising rules, Stone said Facebook decided not to act after concluding that its rules had not been specific enough. He also added that “he has decided to review that decision after questions from the Magazine last week.”
The latest article also claims that when Das joined Facebook in 2011, “the social media giant was eager to prove its usefulness in politics.” So, he implemented training for various Indian political parties on how best to use the platform to mobilize supporters, and Modi’s team embraced the training from the start. In October 2012, Das referred to the training provided to BJP in Gujarat and wrote, “Success in our Gujarat campaign,” while noting that the campaign was close to reaching one million fans on the platform.
In 2013, in another internal post, he described Modi as “the George W. Bush of India” to his colleague Katie Harbath, who is the top global election official on Facebook. Das described Harbath as her “longest traveling companion”, who helped her in the Gujarat campaign. Facebook said it offered similar meetings and training to other parties.
According to the WSJ, when Modi was declared a candidate for prime minister, “Das made her feelings about the race clear.” “When a staff member pointed out in response to one of her internal posts that BJP’s main opponent, the Indian National Congress, had more followers on Facebook than Mr. Modi’s individual page, Ms. Das responded:” Don’t belittle it by comparing it to INC. Ah well, my partiality does not show! “says the article.
In a previous article on August 15, WSJ had reported that Facebook was “biased” toward prominent Hindu nationalists in India, including BJP politicians, whose anti-minority comments violated Facebook community standards. According to the article, Das told members of the tech giant’s staff that punishing violations by BJP politicians would “hurt the company’s business prospects” in India, which is Facebook’s largest global market in terms of the number of users. His stance has sparked an internal debate over Facebook’s promise to remain neutral in elections around the world. He had also apologized to Facebook employees at the company at a town hall meeting for a post last year that labeled a minority a “degenerate community.”
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