Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad wrote a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking the social media giant to put in place country-specific community guidelines. Prasad, while underlining the religious, cultural and linguistic variations in India, mentioned that the Indian ethos must be acknowledged by Facebook Community Guidelines.
In the letter, Prasad said, “I have been informed that in the run-up to the 2019 general elections in India, there was a concerted effort by Facebook India management 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 the rightof-centre ideology. I am also aware that dozens of emails written to Facebook management received no response. The above documented cases of bias and inaction are seemingly a direct outcome of the dominant political beliefs of individuals in your Facebook India team.”
He further added that there are Facebook employees who are on record abusing the Prime Minister and senior cabinet ministers of India while still working in Facebook India and managing important positions. Prasad’s letter to Zuckerberg also took a dig at Sonia-Rahul saying, “Defeated elements are trying to use Facebook to undermine India’s democratic process. Individuals working in any organization may have their likes and dislikes but that must not have any bearing on the public policies and performance of the organisation.”
This concern arose soon after a huge controversy came to light in which a Facebook executive, Ankhi Das, allegedly biased towards members of the BJP, expressed support for PM Narendra Modi ahead of the 2014 general election results. The employee also allegedly did not take action on conflicting posts on Facebook. While Congress MP Rahul Gandhi tagged a recent media report on Facebook India’s neutrality, the BJP, on the other hand, opposed the claim and stated detailed instances of bias by Facebook India against BJP and the right-wing in general.
The Union Minister also spoke on how the Congress has been dominating Facebook India. He mentioned, “It seems from credible media reports that Facebook India team, right from the India Managing Director to other senior officials, is dominated by people who belong to a particular political belief. After having lost all democratic legitimacy, they are trying to discredit India’s democratic process by dominating the decisionmaking apparatus of important social media platforms. The spate of recent anonymous, source-based reports is nothing but an internal power struggle within your company for an ideological hegemony.”
Prasad also raised issues about third-party fact-checkers who are hired by the social media platform. He wrote, “A major issue with Facebook is the outsourcing of fact-checking to third party factcheckers. How can Facebook absolve itself of its responsibility to protect users from misinformation and instead out-source this to shady organizations with no credibility? We have seen in India that right from the assessors for on-boarding fact-checkers to the fact-checkers themselves, harbor publicly expressed political biases. Regularly vigilant volunteers on social media have to fact-check the fact-checkers! Even after onboarding many fact-checkers, lot of misinformation related to Covid-19 and its aftermath went un-checked.”