FB biased against right wing: Prasad
Union minister, in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, said the firm’s India team has acted against those ‘supportive of the right-of-centre’ ideas
NEW DELHI: Facebook’s India team is dominated by people who “belong to a particular political belief” and have acted against users “supportive of the right-of-centre” ideology, Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a letter to the social media company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, adding to allegations that the company was being partisan in tackling content.
The comments made by Prasad in his letter to Zuckerberg puts the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on the same side as opponent Congress in accusing Facebook of political bias, although both say the company acted in a manner that benefits the other.
Shortly after the letter was made public, Congress party and its MP Rahul Gandhi called for an investigation into Facebook.
“I have been informed that in the run up to 2019 general elections in India, there was a concerted effort by Facebook India management to not just delete pages or substantially reduced to reach but also offer no records or right of appeal to affected people who are supportive of the right of the Centre ideology. I’m also aware that dozens of emails written to Facebook management received no response,” Prasad wrote.
Facebook, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, is the dominant social media website in India. Allegations of political bias first appeared on August 14 after a report by Wall Street Journal said the company’s India policy head intervened to stop a ban on a Telangana BJP MLA for making Islamophobic posts citing commercial interests in India. Late on Sunday evening, the paper published a second report claiming the executive, Ankhi Das, expressed open support for Modi on earlier occasions and had worked on his campaign for the 2014 polls.
The company has denied the allegations of bias but did not offer any fresh comments on Prasad’s letter. Interestingly, when Shashi Tharoor, the head of the Parliamentary panel of IT wanted to summon and question Facebook executives on the report, the move was strongly and vehemently opposed by a BJP member on the panel Nishikant Dubey.
With Prasad now airing his grievances against Facebook, the committee should be able to summon its executives so that they can be questioned.
Prasad did not specifically identify which Facebook pages or groups were taken down, but the company removed a page called The India Eye in April, 2019.
In a blog post on April 1, the company said it had removed several pages for ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ -- the term it uses for organised misinformation operations -- including some by Congress IT cell. At the same time, it removed The India Eye, which had a following of 2.6 million people at the time, but did not name the BJP. A screenshot posted by the company then showed the page posting fake news that deprecated the opposition.