BJP lashes out at Congress over social media hate speech row
NEW DELHI: BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad launched an attack on the Congress over a row involving hate speech on the social media, even as the opposition party wrote to the firm’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to say the company may be “a willing participant in thwarting the rights and values”.
BJP said people whose political base has “shrunk like anything” seek to dominate discourse on these platforms and asserted that everybody regardless of their ideology got the right to air their views on the website. Prasad said Congress leader Rahul Gandhi believed that any organisation that did not work to his liking was acting under the pressure of BJP and RSS.
A political slugfest between the Congress and the BJP began after a report in The Wall Street Journal claimed that Facebook ignored its hate speech rules when it came to posts by politicians of the ruling party.
Congress wrote to Zuckerberg, saying the social media company may be “a willing participant in thwarting the rights and values” India’s founding leaders had sacrificed their lives for, and called for an investigation of the report that claimed its Indian staff was soft in handling hate speech by BJP politicians. BJP leaders launched an angry riposte, saying the Congress and its leadership had been reduced to irrelevance and the demand showed a desire to muzzle free speech.
The WSJ report cited interviews with unnamed Facebook insiders and claimed the company’s senior India policy executive Ankhi Das intervened in internal content review processes to stop a ban on BJP’S Telangana lawmaker Raja Singh, whose posts targeted the Muslim community. It said Das told staff members that punishing violations by BJP politicians would damage the company’s business prospects in India.
Sharing the letter written by the Congress, former party president Rahul Gandhi said: “We cannot allow any manipulation of our hard-earned democracy through bias, fake news and hate speech. As exposed by WSJ, Facebook’s involvement in peddling fake and hate news needs to be questioned by all Indians.”