Facebook grapples with amplified version of problems
India proving to be a struggle with hate speech, violence
On Feb. 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India.
For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook's algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.
The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.
“Following this test user's News Feed, I've seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I've seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.
The report was one of dozens of studies and memos written by Facebook employees grappling with the effects of the platform on India. They provide stark evidence of one of the most serious
criticisms levied by human rights activists and politicians against the world-spanning company: It moves into a country without fully understanding its potential effects on local culture and politics, and fails to deploy the resources to act on issues once they occur.
With 340 million people using Facebook's various social media platforms, India is the company's largest market. And Facebook's problems on the subcontinent present an amplified version of the issues it has faced throughout the world, made worse by a lack of resources and a lack of expertise in India's 22 officially recognized languages.
The internal documents, obtained
by a consortium of news organizations that included The New York Times, are part of a larger cache of material called The Facebook Papers. They were collected by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who became a whistleblower and recently testified before a Senate subcommittee about the company and its social media platforms. References to India were scattered among documents filed by Haugen to the Securities and Exchange Commission in a complaint earlier this month.
The documents include reports on how bots and fake accounts tied to the country's ruling party and opposition figures were wreaking havoc on national elections. They also detail how a plan championed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to focus on “meaningful social interactions,” or exchanges between friends and family, was leading to more misinformation in India, particularly during the pandemic.
Facebook did not have enough resources in India and was unable to grapple with the problems it had introduced there, including anti-Muslim posts, according to its documents. Eighty-seven percent of the company's global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation is earmarked for the United States, while only 13% is set aside for the rest of the world even though North American users make up only 10% of the social network's daily active users, according to one document describing Facebook's allocation of resources.
Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, said the figures were incomplete and don't include the company's third-party fact-checking partners, most of whom are outside the United States.
That lopsided focus on the United States has had consequences in a number of countries besides India. Company documents showed that Facebook installed measures to demote mis