By Saaransh Mishra and Aditya Burra
On 14th August, a report published in the Wall Street Journal insinuated that Facebook was favouring ruling party politicians in India to protect business interests in its biggest market. In the controversial report, WSJ accused Facebook of bending backwards to favour the BJP and even going to the extent of ignoring hate speech by party leaders. The reports claimed that Facebook kept allowing hate speech by BJP politicians on its platform, wary that censoring members of the ruling party could hurt its business prospects in India. A BJP MLA from Telangana, T. Raja Singh was flagged by Facebook’s internal mechanisms for propagating ideas that were blatant Anti-Muslim. Singh was not only guilty of hate-speech but was also deemed a “dangerous individual”- a category that takes the ability to spark real-world violence into account. However, Facebook’s top policy executive in South Asia, Ankhi Das’s name surfaced, alleging her of opposing a ban on T. Raja Singh, on the grounds that banning someone from the ruling party could seriously hamper business prospects in India, which is the largest market for Facebook in the world.
The WSJ report has sparked calls by opposition MPs for an investigation into Facebook’s conduct in India. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi led the charge by alleging that the BJP and RSS were controlling “Facebook” in India. Despite the recent report being the clearest link between Facebook and the BJP in India, this is not the first. Previously, Bloomberg had published a report in 2017, stating that Facebook employees had become ‘de facto’ campaign workers in India and that Facebook majorly helped Narendra Modi build his online presence. A year before that, a report by the Guardian talked about the connections that Ankhi Das had in the Modi Government. India media outlets like the Caravan and Newsclick have carried out investigations to unravel the nexus between Facebook and the BJP, and have also found out that senior employees of Facebook in India have in the past worked, and continue to work with the ruling party since (the BJP) since 2011.
In light of the aforementioned, as well as the recent developments, The Congress on Tuesday asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to set-up a high-level inquiry into the Facebook India leadership team and their operations. It has asked the company to make public all instances of hate speech posts since 2014 on the platform. The Congress has also suggested the appointment of a new team to lead India’s operations till the enquiry is completed.
India’s information technology minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad promptly responded to the Congress’s backlash by alluding to his remarks from 2018 about “numerous reports” of Congress involvement with Cambridge Analytica and asking Mr Rahul Gandhi to explain the company’s role in his social media outreach. However, amid all the mud-slinging that has been taking place in the past few days, there must be a thorough investigation of all such allegations to ensure that these networks are not used as weapons to incite violence, hatred and facilitate divisive politics.
Across the world, questions are being raised at Mark Zuckerberg and his executives over their procedural code and content regulation processes. There is no time more pertinent than now for policy consistency and diverse representation within the company. The company has already been accused of monopolizing the social media space via acquisitions and mergers, the buying of potential competitive threats that violate anti-trust laws.
Social media companies, especially Facebook, have also come under fire for their lax approach to policing fake news content and outright disinformation, and the spread of content pushing bigotry and outright violence. Just this year, the deliberately vague policies in place at Facebook have already enabled harassment, rampant misinformation, and in some cases, disinformation by Donald Trump regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement. Facebook executives such as Joel Kaplan (Public Policy Chief) have reportedly intervened to prevent misinformation strikes that would typically result in page suspensions. Despite all of this, Facebook’s stock seems to show no indication, growing by nearly 30% since the beginning of the year.
The posts in question have now been deleted from the website. Seeing as how social media is increasingly how people receive their news and where they spend most of their waking hours, there is a heightened responsibility to keep those who wield political power responsible and accountable for their words. If not this, the social media behemoths shouldn’t, at the very least, allow outright hate speech to be spewed at minorities and the disfranchised. The Congress Party has called for a parliamentary probe into the matter, while BJP politicians have retorted, accusing Facebook of censoring their voices. Facebook has not yet publicly responded to any comments.