Delhi user, went through physical verification, appalled at Facebook reply

The New Delhi-based user, who had to go through physical verification by a Facebook representative to verify if the post with political content was actually written by him, on Monday slammed the reply from the social media giant.

The person was recently visited by a Facebook representative for the verification process related to the content he had posted.

Facebook denied this, saying "it does not conduct any form of physical verification in India, except for an advertiser who plans to run ads related to politics or issues of national importance in India".

Reacting to Facebook's reply, the user said: "I do not buy this statement. For me, it was a sort of police verification done in a civilian manner for political content that I had posted".

"The harassment I went through cannot be washed away by Facebook. I have kept my options open to deal with the situation," the person, who does not want to disclose his identity, told IANS.

The user was left stunned to see the Facebook representative landing at his home for inquiring about a post.

"It was a shocker for me. How come a social media platform does that to a user? What about a user's privacy? I have never heard of any such incident anywhere. Was this at the behest of the government?" asked the user.

This kind of behaviour has not been seen or reported earlier even at the global level as several countries have gone through the elections with Facebook trying its best to curb misinformation.

Legal experts have called for a tougher action against Facebook for physically verifying a user, that is unprecedented.

Physical verification of a user is gross violation and unwarranted under the ambit of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

--IANS

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