A right-wing Indian politician who incited violence against Muslims and burned mosques is still active on Facebook and Instagram, although officials at the social media company said earlier this year that the Indian politician had used hate speech. The rules were violated.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision not to take action against Raja Singh, a member of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), came at a time when Facebook's top public policy executive in India Ankhi Das opposed the imposition of hate speech laws on Raja Singh and three other Hindu nationalists even though they promoted and participated in violence.
According to the report, Facebook employees responsible for overseeing the platform concluded that by March, Raja Singh had not only violated the rules of hate speech against Muslims online and offline, but also against Rohingya immigrants. He has fallen into the dangerous category of choosing his own words for inciting global violence against Muslims.
Instead of imposing a permanent ban on him, Telangana Legislative Assembly member Raja Singh was allowed to remain active on Facebook and Instagram, where he has thousands of followers.
The decision was prompted by Ankhi Das, whose job includes lobbying for the Indian government through Facebook, and told staff members that the country would be punished if violations by BJP politicians were punished. It will hurt the company's business prospects where India is Facebook's largest global market.
It added that the way in which Facebook has applied the principles of its hate speech to prominent Hindu nationalists in India shows that political reservations are also part of the account of monitoring hate speech. Go
The report cites current and former Facebook employees who say Das's intervention for the Sangh reflects Facebook's broader bias towards Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu hardliners.
A Facebook spokesperson responded to the allegations by admitting that Das had expressed concerns over the political implications that could have led to Raja Singh being declared dangerous, but that only he could remain on the platform. Opposition to the ban is not the only factor. The spokesman said Facebook was still considering whether the ban had been ratified.
Following the Wall Street Journal's investigation, Facebook deleted some of Singh's posts, the company said, adding that the BJP legislator was no longer allowed to have a verified official account that could be identified by a blue mark.
According to the report, the correspondent said that Facebook bans speech and violence globally regardless of one's political affiliation or party affiliation, adding that the company carried out a deadly attack in New Delhi earlier this year. Rejection of material praising the violence during the protests.
But a team under Das's supervision, which decides what content should be allowed on Facebook, did not take any action when BJP politicians made the allegation, a former employee said. That Muslims are deliberately spreading the Corona virus, conspiring against the nation and running "Lo Jihad" campaigns seeking marriage to Hindu women.
Das also allegedly provided favorable treatment to the BJP on election-related issues and wrote an article in 2017 praising Modi.
In April 2019, Facebook announced that it had removed rude pages linked to the Pakistani military and India's Congress party, the report said, adding that it had not disclosed the reason for Das's intervention. Whether or not to remove BJP-linked false news pages.
It also said that Facebook had removed some posts by another BJP MLA, Anant Kumar Hegde, who accused Muslims of spreading code 19 in the country as part of a "corona jihad". But the information was provided at the request of the Wall Street Journal.
The report further revealed that when the newspaper inquired about further steps in this regard, he said that the controversial posts of former BJP lawmaker Kapil Mishra had also been removed.
In a speech in February, Kapil Mishra warned police that if they did not remove protesters protesting India's controversial citizenship law, which excludes Muslim wimmigrants, their supporters would use force Will do.
The Wall Street Journal quoted court documents as saying that sectarian riots broke out shortly after Mishra uploaded the video to Facebook, killing dozens of people, mostly Muslims. Some of the deaths were caused by Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which later removed the video post.
