NEW YORK: Facebook’s business prospects in India — its biggest market by number of users — are at odds with the company’s hate-speech rules, a report by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) revealed on Friday.
Evidence of this is the presence of T. Raja Singh on the social media platform despite repeated incidents of hate speech and incitement to violence in public speeches as well as in posts on Facebook.
Singh, who is a member of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, has “said Rohingya Muslim immigrants should be shot, called Muslims traitors and threatened to raze mosques”, according to the WSJ report.
Company employees tasked with monitoring such activities concluded that Singh had not only violated the hate-speech rules of the platform but qualifies as “dangerous”, the publication said, quoting current and former employees. The classification takes into account a person’s “off-platform activities”.
The current and former employees who spoke to the American media outlet said that given India’s track record of communal violence and recent religious tensions, “his rhetoric could lead to real-world violence, and he should be permanently banned from the company’s platforms world-wide”.
Nevertheless, he remains an active member of Facebook as well as Instagram.
The current and former employees said that Ankhi Das, who is in charge of Facebook’s public policy in India, was against applying hate-speech rules to Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups which the platform had flagged for “promoting or participating in violence”.
Das told Facebook staffers that punishing members of the BJP would “damage the company’s business prospects in the country”, the employees said.
The WSJ notes that while Facebook faces a monumental challenging in policing hate-speech across the mass volume of content posted on the platform, the way its hate-speech rules have been applied in India’s case suggests that political considerations are very much a part of the equation.
“A core problem at Facebook is that one policy org is responsible for both the rules of the platform and keeping governments happy,” Alex Stamos, who is Facebook’s former chief security officer wrote in a post on Twitter in May.
A Facebook spokesman, Andy Stone, while acknowledging that Das was concerned about the political fallout from designating Singh “dangerous”, said her opposition “wasn’t the sole factor in the company’s decision” to let Singh remain on the platform.
Stone said Facebook is “still considering whether a ban is warranted”.
The spokesman said Facebook prohibits hate speech and violence globally “without regard to anyone’s political position or party affiliation,” adding that it took down content that praised violence earlier this year during deadly protests in New Delhi.
Das and her team
Das joined Facebook in 2011 and heads a team that decides what content should be allowed on the platform, a former employee was quoted by the WSJ as saying.
After BJP politicians posted content accusing Muslims of deliberately spreading the coronavirus, plotting against India and waging a “love jihad” campaign by seeking to marry Hindu women, no action was taken by the team.
According to current and former employees Das provided “favourable treatment” to BJP on election-related issues.
In April last year, shortly before polling took place, Facebook announced it had taken down inauthentic pages tied to Pakistan’s military and India’s Congress party. But what it didn’t disclose was that after Das’s intervention, pages with false news traced to the BJP were also removed.
Das also wrote an essay in 2017 praising Modi, which he posted to his website, reported the WSJ.
Posts removed after WSJ enquiry
After Singh was found peddling anti-Muslim rhetoric, Facebook’s safety staff concluded that the activities warranted his permanent ban under Facebook’s “Dangerous Individuals and Organisations” policy, the current and former employees said.
But it was only after the WSJ inquired about the posts that Facebook deleted some of them.
According to the WSJ, Singh is “no longer is permitted to have an official, verified account, designated with a blue check mark badge”.
Another BJP lawmaker, Anantkumar Hegde, posted anti-Muslim content on the platform, which human rights groups say are linked to attacks on Muslims in India, and have been designated as hate speech by Twitter Inc.
While Twitter suspended Hegde’s account, Facebook took no action until WSJ inquired from Facebook about the matter. Some of the posts were then removed on Thursday.
Another lawmaker from the party, Kapil Mishra warned police in a speech to remove protesters demonstrating against the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act and that if they did not, force would be used by his supporters to do so.
According to the WSJ, within hours of the speech being uploaded to Facebook, violence broke out, leaving dozens dead, mostly Muslims. Court documents filed by police showed that most of the attacks were organized via Facebook’s WhatsApp platform.
After WSJ asked for a comment about Mishra’s posts, some were removed on Thursday.
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