Is Facebook favoring the ruling BJP in India?

Did Facebook easily go over hate speech by an Indian lawmaker who belonged to the ruling BJP to protect its interests in its biggest market? A Wall Street Journal report, based on interviews with current and former Facebook employees, suggests that, and it called for immediate calls for an investigation. Soutik Biswas reports on the aftermath.

In its report, the WSJ said that Facebook removed some hateful anti-Muslim posts by T Raja Singh, a lawmaker from the southern state of Telangana of India, only after asking for paper about her.

The paper reported that Facebook staff in March had decided that Mr Singh’s post speaking the rules of hate speech and qualifying was dangerous. But India’s chief executive, Ankhi Das, opposes’ application of ‘hate speech rules’ to Mr Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups who are flagged internally for promoting or participating in the violence ‘.

Ms Das, the paper said, told staff that “punishing violations by politicians of Mr Modi’s party would damage the business perspective of the company in the country”.

The WSJ report has made calls by opposition members for parliamentary inquiries into the holding and wearing of Facebook in India.

The leader of the main party of the opposition Congress, Rahul Gandhi, led the charge. He claimed that the BJP, and its ideological source, RSS, were “controlling” Facebook in India.

India’s Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar responded immediately. He referred to his previous comments in 2018 on “numerous reports” of Congress’ involvement in Cambridge Analytica and asked Mr Gandhi to “explain” the role of the company in its social media outreach. (That year, India had taken down Cambridge Analytica’s local website after allegations that the company used personal data of 50 million Facebook members to influence the US presidential election.)

With over 340 million users, India is Facebook’s largest market. In April, Facebook announced that it had invested $ 5.7 billion (£ 4.6 billion) in cut-off Indian mobile internet company Reliance Jio, owned by the country’s richest person Mukesh Ambani. This would give Facebook a big foothold in India, where its WhatsApp chat service has 400m users and is about to launch a payment service.

I came to Facebook with a list of detailed questions. I wondered why Facebook had not taken down Mr Singh’s messages earlier, what it did with the legislator’s account and how many pages were taken down and accounts were held in India for hate speech.

“We ban hate speech and content that incites violence and we enforce this policy worldwide, regardless of one’s political position or party affiliation. While we know there is more to do, we are making progress in enforcing and celebrating regular audits of our process to ensure honesty and accuracy, “a Facebook spokesman replied in an email response. The company did not provide further details.

Separately, Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, acknowledged to WSJ that Ankhi Das had “worried about the political fallout that would result from designating Mr Singh a dangerous individual, but said her opposition was not the only factor in the company’s decided to leave Mr Singh on the platform “. Mr Stone told me he had nothing more to add.

BJP lawmaker T Raja Singh said his official Facebook page with 300,000 followers in 2018 was “hacked and deleted” and he had complained about it to local cybercrime detectives. “I do not know if it is abusive,” he told me.

He said Facebook may have taken down pages recently, driven by his followers and containing inflammatory content. He said his followers may have uploaded “hate speech” on these pages.

“Sometimes I go to public meetings and talk in style. My followers might have uploaded these videos,” said Mr Singh, the only BJP legislator in the 119-member Telangana state assembly. Mr. Stone told WSJ that Facebook is still considering if it will ban the legislature.

When I asked him why he would post such offensive content, Mr Singh said: “There are a lot of antisocials in my area. I serve them in their language, sometimes it is common”. He said his Instagram account, which was still active, was not operated by him.

This is not the first time allegations have been made that Facebook is the ruling party’s favorite.

A series of articles by journalists Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in 2018, wrote about the “dominant position of social media platform in India with more than a little help from friends of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP”, among other things. (The articles also looked at the Congress party’s own “relations with Facebook.”)

The head of the Congress party of data analytics, Praveen Chakravarty, says that in 2018 he met senior Facebook officials in the US and India and “discussed the issue of bias and partisanship of their India leadership team” and refused to accept party advertisements regarding a controversial fighter jet deal by the government. “I was told there will be viewing, but nothing happened,” he says.

Last year, Derek O’Brien, a lawmaker who was a member of the opposition Trinamul Congress party, raised the issue in parliament. “Facebook censors anti-BJP news. The algorithm censors anti-BJP news,” Mr O’Brien said in a short speech. When I reached out to him over the weekend, Mr O’Brien said: “There are other major issues to be raised in Parliament, but this will not go unnoticed.”

Shashi Tharoor, a leading MP from Congress who is a parliamentary committee on information about technology, says he believes the “recent revelations raise questions that need explanation”.

“The issue is serious because of the widespread reach of Facebook in India and the potential for hate speech to incite violence and other unlawful conduct. How concerns should be addressed after a hearing is closed, not based on media reports,” he said. told me.

Chinmayi Arun, a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, says it is difficult to assess Facebook’s record without access to company data in India.

“There are contexts in which they have reacted quickly or improved their policies based on feedback. But the implementation system is opaque and one will probably not hear about the kind of incident that the WSJ reported unless insiders only share information for Facebook. share, “Mrs. Arun told me.

In its latest biennial report on enforcement of Community Standards, Facebook said it had taken action against more than 20 million pieces of hate speech content that had been in breach of their community standards between January and March. But in their biggest market, many say that social media management needs to do more.