FB slaps ban on BJP leader over hate speech
NEW DELHI: Facebook has banned the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Telangana legislator T Raja Singh, who has been at the centre of a political furore over a report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that the social media company adopted a soft approach towards purported hate speech by the MLA and other functionaries to protect its business interests in India.
“We have banned Raja Singh from Facebook for violating our policy prohibiting those that promote or engage in violence and hate from having a presence on our platform,” a Facebook spokesperson said on Thursday. Raja Singh has been banned under Facebook’s “dangerous individuals and organisations policy”. The ban means he will not be allowed on Facebook and Instagram and the social media company will remove any pages, groups or accounts representing him if they come up. WSJ first reported the ban on Thursday morning. An August 14 report by the newspaper claimed that Facebook staff had considered taking down Raja Singh’s profile on the social media network in 2018 because of inflammatory messages posted by the Hyderabad-based legislator, targeting the Muslim community, before
Ankhi Das, who leads Facebook’s policy efforts in New Delhi, intervened to block the move on grounds that it could potentially harm its interests in India.
The Goshamahal legislator later in the day said that the posts were not made using his account.
The claims in the reports prompted the opposition parties to seek an investigation into whether Facebook applies its content moderation rules in a politically partisan manner, a claim the August 14 article and subsequent news reports by the same paper and Time later repeated.