The Facebook Crisis in India Might Be the Worst Facebook Crisis of All By Nitish Pahwa https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-papers-india-modi-misinformation-rss-bjp.html
Oct 26, 2021
Facebook ignored, downplayed, or failed to adequately address harassment, mis- and disinformation, and incitements to violence on its platform in several major countries. ..Yet the most shocking revelations concern the nation that serves as the app’s biggest user base: India, the world’s largest backsliding democracy.
.. the Facebook Papers confirm is not just that the network failed to curb Hindu nationalist hate speech and inadequately directed resources to monitor a nation with 340 million users; it also actively granted impunity to the worst offenders.
the company’s “misinformation classifiers”—automated systems trained on machine learning to detect and take down posts with harmful falsehoods—were not developed enough to recognize and take action on millions of multilanguage disinformation posts that proliferated across Indian feeds.
reports of BJP-linked cells using Facebook and WhatsApp to spread toxic rhetoric and lies surfaced as early as 2016; more such troll operations proliferated in the subsequent years, both within and without election contexts, and led directly to lynchings of religious minorities and riots stirred up by aggrieved Hindus...According to the Wall Street Journal, investigators zoned in on two BJP-linked Hindu nationalist organizations they pinpointed as key drivers of mass Islamophobia, the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, and recommended that the latter be banned. But it didn’t happen, as the company worried that removing the Bajrang Dal would anger Modi. The Journal revealed last year that the then-head of Facebook India, Ankhi Das, opposed applying hate speech rules to Hindu nationalists and BJP politicians.. (Das stepped down by October 2020.)
This year, Modi’s government has cracked down the hardest it ever has on Facebook and other social networks, forcing them to remove posts unfavorable to the BJP, condemning them for spreading content supposedly offensive to fundamentalist Hindus, and threatening to fully expel them if they don’t follow new, restrictive rules drawn up by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology meant to ensure compliance. The message is clear: If Facebook doesn’t follow the BJP’s Hindu nationalist dogma to a T, it can kiss its largest market goodbye.
