Congress on Monday accused Facebook of bias and alignment with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Congress' Data Analytics chief Praveen Chakravarty said that Facebook India's alignment is not just with one person, but there are many in the leadership team with a close working relationship with people in the saffron party. He also gave 'various instances' of the social media website's interference in the Indian elections.
"The story of Wall Street Journal is a mere confirmation of what we always knew but no one in India is brave enough to report them," he said. "There is clear and ample evidence to warrant a serious investigation by Facebook headquarters into the operations of its India team and their efforts in actively interfering in the Indian electoral democracy," Chakravarty added.
For the uninitiated, Facebook’s top public policy executive in India Ankhi Das opposed applying hate speech rules to the BJP MLA T Raja Singh out of fear of ruining the company’s relationship with the ruling party. Singh had reportedly said Rohingya Muslim immigrants should be "shot".
As per Facebook's recently introduced new hate speech rules to curb unnecessary hate-mongering, Singh's post violated the rules. However, Das "opposed applying the hate-speech rules to Mr. Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence."
“Ms. Das, whose job also includes lobbying India’s government on Facebook’s behalf, told staff members that punishing violations by politicians from Mr. Modi’s party would damage the company’s business prospects in the country…,” Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report said, quoting unnamed current and former company officials.
Meanwhile, the BJP and the Congress are now at loggerheads. "BJP & RSS control Facebook & Whatsapp in India. They spread fake news and hatred through it and use it to influence the electorate. Finally, the American media has come out with the truth about Facebook," said Rahul Gandhi.
Reacting to Gandhi, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, in turn, slammed Congress for being "caught red-handed in alliance with Cambridge Analytica & Facebook to weaponise data before the elections". "Losers who cannot influence people even in their own party keep cribbing that the entire world is controlled by BJP and RSS," he added.
BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya called the allegations "ludicrous". "It is ludicrous to suggest that the BJP and the wider conservative ecosystem is aligned to Facebook. In fact, the reverse is true. In the run-up to the 2019 general elections, Facebook removed 700 pages. Most of them were aligned to a nationalist narrative," Malviya told ANI.
"The communities that they have taken down after that is also fairly large. There is no redressal whatsoever. Therefore to suggest that Facebook is aligned to BJP is absolutely untrue," he added.
Meanwhile, the Congress has demanded the formation of a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) to investigate the matter.
