Facebook takes down pages linked to Congress & BJP but names only INC

The Head of Facebook’s cyber-security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher in a statement on Monday announced that it had taken down Facebook pages linked to the “Congress IT Cell and an IT firm Silver Touch” without mentioning the links of Silver Touch, an Ahmedabad based firm, with the BJP.

The slip was suspicious and appeared motivated at election time, especially because the pages maintained by the IT firm had ten times the traffic of pages allegedly linked to the Congress IT Cell and had double the ad-spend.

Gleicher went on to explain, “When we take down one of these networks, it is because of their deceptive behaviour. It’s not because of the content they are sharing. The posts themselves may not be false and may not go against our community standards.”

15 such pages linked to individuals were associated with Silver Touch. The portfolio of Silver Touch includes websites for Rashtrapati Bhavan, several union ministries, the Nehru Memorial Museum Library, Gandhi Heritage Portal, the Make in India event mobile app, and several Gujarat government institutions.

The Congress said no official pages run by the party had been taken down by Facebook. “All the pages run by our verified volunteers are also unaffected. In the meantime, we are awaiting a response from Facebook to provide us a list of all pages/accounts that they have taken down,” Congress media-in-charge Randeep Surjewala said.

He said the BJP had spent Rs 1.5 crore on advertising on Facebook between March 2 and March 16. “Our ad spend on Facebook was only Rs 1.68 lakh,” he said, adding that the Congress would like to know what action Facebook had taken against the 321 verified pages of the BJP on which fake and derogatory news is often published.

In the case of the Silver Touch-linked accounts taken down by Facebook, there was one page, 12 Facebook accounts, one group and one Instagram account. The page (The India Eye) alone had about 2.6 million accounts following it. Another 15,000 groups were joined to the one group, and the Instagram account had 30,000 followers. The advertisement spends here was $70,000.

Ben Nimmo, senior fellow at Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, tweeted: “A few big pages were supporting @BJP4India, and run by people associated with Silver Touch, an IT firm which created @narendramodi’s app. Lots of smaller ones were run by people associated with an @INCIndia IT cell…. The big hitter in the pro-BJP group was India Eye, with over 2 million followers on FB and over 30k on Instagram. India Eye has been suspected of links to Silver Touch since at least last year….”