Amid hate speech row, Facebook India says it has no 'political affiliation'

Ajit Mohan, managing director of Facebook India, says social network will remove content posted by public figures in India when it violates the company's Community Standards

Facebook described as "incredibly seriously" allegations that it favoured the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), insisting it denounces hate and was committed to being transparent and non-partisan.

“We have an impartial approach to dealing with content and are strongly governed by our Community Standards. We enforce these policies globally without regard to anyone’s political position, party affiliation or religious and cultural belief," said Ajit Mohan, managing director of Facebook India, in a blog post.

Mohan said Facebook has and will continue to remove content posted by public figures in India when it violates the company’s Community Standards.

The Wall Street Journal last week said Facebook overlooked its hate speech policies and allowed controversial posts by Telangana BJP MLA T Raja Singh and three other “Hindu nationalist individuals and groups” to safeguard the social media platform’s business. The newspaper report said Facebook India’s top public policy executive “opposed applying hate-speech rules” to individuals linked with the BJP even though they were “flagged internally for promoting violence”.

This has triggered a political slugfest in the country with the parliamentary standing committee on Information Technology summoning Facebook on September 2 to discuss the issue.

Mohan said that the social media giant takes inputs from external sources and internal cross-functional teams to make decisions about removing posts. “These decisions cannot and are not made unilaterally by just one person; rather, they are inclusive of different views from around the company, a process that is critical to making sure we consider, understand and account for both local and global contexts.”

Facebook, for whom India is the largest market with over 300 million users, had claimed that it removed 22.5 million pieces of hate speech content in the second quarter of 2020, up from 1.6 million in the last quarter of 2017.

 

“We welcome the opportunity to engage with all parties - political or otherwise - who want to understand our content policies and enforcement more,” said Mohan in the post.

Facebook is learnt to have appointed an Oversight Board to investigate the WSJ report and allegations after that. “The members of the Oversight Board are currently undergoing training on Facebook’s community standards, policy development processes and enforcement frameworks, as well as the types of content decisions that are in scope for the board,” said the company in an emailed response to Business Standard.

The board comprises 20 independent members from around the world, including Sudhir Krishnaswamy from India, who is Vice-Chancellor of the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru.

In conjunction with the Oversight Board, the company would be announcing new members later this year, it said.