New Delhi: In a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, India’s Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad claimed there was “a concerted effort by Facebook… to not just delete pages or substantially reduce their reach but also offer no recourse or right of appeal to affected people who are supportive of right-of-center ideology,” ahead of the last year’s elections in India.
“This interference in India’s political process through gossip, whispers and innuendo is condemnable,” Prasad wrote on Tuesday.The minister’s intervention comes a few weeks after a Wall Street Journal article caused a political row in India making the opposite claim: that Facebook showed a pattern of favoritism towards India’s governing party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
According the WSJ, current and former Facebook employees said Facebook’s top policy official in India, Ankhi Das, had prevented anti-Muslim hate speech from being removed from the platform. They claim Das has openly supported the BJP.
The WSJ report also claimed that Facebook failed to take down posts containing hate speech against Muslims by a Hindu nationalist lawmaker out of concern for its business interests in India.
Following the report, a parliamentary committee summoned Facebook representatives to testify about Facebook’s policies on September 2. The opposition Congress party has accused the social media giant of favouring the BJP. The party said in a statement Tuesday that there was a “blasphemous nexus between the BJP and Facebook.”
Facebook’s Indian head Ajit Mohan has defended the company’s actions and denied any bias.According to another report in Time magazine, Facebook has already commissioned an independent report on its impact on human rights in India.
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