The US newspaper, The Wall Street Journal published a report on Friday attributing BJP’s campaign success in the virtual world to the party’s close ties with Facebook - the largest social media company in the world, which also owns WhatsApp. It claimed that the most popular social messaging app in India had bent over backwards in order to favour the BJP. They said that Facebook does this by going to the extent of ignoring hate speech amongst other things.
There can definitely be a case made on how BJP members have been easily let off by Facebook. Earlier, T Raja Singh was flagged by Facebook’s internal mechanisms as he pushed ideas that included calls for the killing of beef eating Muslim, demolishing mosques and even talking about having Rohingya Muslims shot dead. As a result of his opinions, Singh was guilty of hate speech as well as classified as a “dangerous individual” – a category created by Facebook themselves that considers the ability to spark real-world violence. However, Singh’s account was not taken down by Facebook and he is still an active user.
This isn’t the first time that such claims are being made. Caravan published a piece in 2018 that reported on how an investigation done on the allegations of corruption against Jay Shah, Home Minister Amit Shah’s son, had been throttled by Facebook. In the international media as well, Bloomberg in 2017 had come up with a report which claimed Facebook employees in India to have become “de facto campaign workers”. “Facebook helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”, it said.
While it can certainly be inferred that Facebook needs to work on its algorithms and fact checking mechanisms, there needs to be more research on all parties to understand whether this behaviour by Facebook is exclusively towards the BJP.
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