Facebook already facing hate-speech issue in US. Now it starts in India also. According to report, Congress party lawmaker Shashi Tharoor said; Congress leader Rahul Gandhi accused the BJP of “controlling” Facebook and demanded a joint probe by Parliament’s two houses.
Members of the governing party BJP of India refused allegations which Facebook has opted to turn a blind eye on hatred speech that was partisan on its own stage.
The party members accused of censoring articles that was pro-India, Facebook. As use has spread over India, Facebook and its subsidiary WhatsApp have turned into fierce battlegrounds to India’s political parties, but spokesmen for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party denied a newspaper report which claimed Facebook officials decided to not do it against party members whose articles broken rules against hate speech.
Based on Wall Street Journal report stated Facebook India’s head of public coverage, Anhki Das,”than implementing hate-speech rules” to at least four people and groups linked with the BJP even though they had been “flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence.”
“There are millions of articles mocking Hindu gods and abusing right-of-center leaders. But Facebook’s advanced algorithms and community standards don’t grab them. However, unsuspecting ordinary people running pro-right-of-center webpage’s are suspended without a more right to appeal,” fellow BJP lawmaker Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore wrote in an op-ed in the Indian Express newspaper.
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Facebook explained in an announcement Monday that it prohibits hate speech and content which incites violence and enforces those rules internationally “without regard to anybody’s political standing or party affiliation.”
Ever since coming to power at 2014, Modi’s party has used Facebook to reach Republicans over India. The party has vastly outspent its primary opposition, the Congress party, on social networking ads.
Modi himself has a massive following on social networking and has asked his party’s grassroots operatives and leaders to be active on Facebook.
“BJP is much ahead of others in harnessing the energy of modern communications, including social media. That is the case of its presence not only on Facebook but other such platforms too,” party vice president Baijayant Panda said on Monday, pointing to a slew of videoconferences and virtual reality rallies through India’s month-long coronavirus lockdown.
Panda and other BJP leaders stated that the allegation which Facebook was providing the exact party preferential treatment stemmed from the once-dominant Congress party’s political misfortunes in the past few decades.
Throughout India’s general elections at 2019, which the BJP won in a landslide, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking giants were asked to stick to this Indian Election Commission’s Code of Conduct, including a ban on political ads throughout the 48-hour period before polling.
