Growing clamour for JPC probe against Facebook

The Union Minister this week wrote to Facebook founder and chief a letter alleging that Facebook employees were against right-wing politicians and were abusing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other Union Ministers on their internal platform.

More seriously, Ravi Shankar Prasad alleged that the opposition party Congress had infiltrated Facebook and was using the social media platform to further its political agenda.

“It is problematic when Facebook employees are on record abusing the Prime Minister and senior Cabinet ministers of India while still working in Facebook India and managing important positions,” Prasad, who also holds the Electronics and Information Technology portfolio, said in his letter. “It is doubly problematic when the bias of individuals becomes an inherent bias of the platform.”

Prasad alleged that in the run up to the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, Facebook’s management in India made an effort to “not just delete pages or substantially reduce their reach but also offer no recourse or right of appeal to affected people who are supportive of the right-ofcentre ideology”.

The minister said there were “credible reports” to show that the Facebook India team “is dominated by people who belong to a particular political belief ”. “People from this political predisposition have been overwhelmingly defeated in successive free and fair elections,” Prasad said.

AITC MP and party spokesperson Derek O’Brien also wrote a letter on August 30, alleging that Facebook had removed accounts of hundreds of party’s supporters for violating its community standards in the run up to its Foundation Day last month.

“We, the All India Trinamool Congress, India’s second-largest opposition party, have had serious concerns about Facebook’s role during the 2014 and 2019 elections in India,” O’Brien said. “With the elections in the Indian state of West Bengal just months away, your company’s recent blocking of Facebook pages and accounts in Bengal also points to the link between Facebook and the BJP. There is enough material now in the public domain, including internal memos of senior Facebook management, to substantiate the bias.”

Demand for a probe into Facebook India’s relations with the Government and the BJP, its community standards, its algorithms and its hiring and firing policies has been growing ever since Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and Time magazine reported the platform’s business interests in India, citing internal communications and quoting anonymous Facebook India employees.

The reports show facebook in poor light, its chief lobbyist with the Government, Ankhi Das promoting BJP and refusing to take down hate speeches by BJP leaders lest it affects the company’s commercial interests. A letter written by Manish Tiwari last month to Zuckerberg was promptly shared with BJP’s IT Cell chief Amit Malviya, who took to Twitter to refute Tiwari’s allegations.

Congress MP and past president Rahul Gandhi tweeted, “International media have fully exposed Facebook’s & WhatsApp’s brazen assault on India’s democracy & social harmony. No one, let alone a foreign company, can be allowed to interfere in our nation’s affairs. They must be investigated immediately & when found guilty, punished.”

Prasad’s letter was meant, almost certainly, as a damage control measure and to enable Facebook India to claim that the platform is so independent and free that its platform (almost certainly internal) is used even by its own employees to criticize the Indian Prime Minister. While Facebook employees claim a certain degree of freedom they enjoy in their internal communication and in sessions addressed by Zuckerberg (where he apparently mentioned once that Narendra Modi was perceived as a tyrant), Prasad’s letter may have unintended consequences.

It will almost certainly give a push to the demand for a JPC probe against Facebook India. It will also put the focus firmly back on sites and facebook pages close to the BJP accused of peddling fake news and hate speech. The letter will also have the unintended consequence of inviting closer scrutiny of relations between the Government and Facebook. What Prasad has failed to address is why unlike China, India has not been able to develop its own indigenously developed alternative to Facebook. And why his Government and ministry have failed to bring in legislation to force multinational companies to abide by Indian laws and Indian community standards.

Facebook on its part claims to have removed millions of hate speech. More than seven million instances of hate speech were removed in the third quarter of 2019, the company claimed to Time magazine. Artificial Intelligence was being used to detect hate speech although only four Indian languages figure among the 40 languages that are being scanned by AI. Out of the 22 official languages of India, only four — Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Tamil — are covered by Facebook’s algorithms, Time was told.

“In Assam, the global advocacy group Avaaz has identified an ongoing campaign of hate by the Assamese speaking, largely Hindu, majority against the Bengali-speaking, largely Muslim, minority. In a report published in October, Avaaz detailed Facebook posts calling Bengali Muslims “parasites,” “rats” and “rapists,” and calling for Hindu girls to be poisoned to stop Muslims from raping them. The posts were viewed at least 5.4 million times. The U.N. has called the situation there a “potential humanitarian crisis,” reported the magazine.

Facebook also announced it is taking extra steps to detect and remove hate speech and election disinformation ahead of Myanmar’s election scheduled for November 8, 2020. The announcement comes two years after the company admitted its failure to prevent the platform from being used to incite violence against the country’s Rohingya minority.

Paradoxically, as Facebook grows bigger and its profits soar, it is also getting into controversies and resistance. Last year The New York Times created a video to wish the social media site “15 more years of disinformation, hate speech, data breach, violation of privacy and interfering with elections” among other things. The video listed the number of times Mark Zuckerberg had to say ‘sorry’ during the first 15 years of the tech giant.

Zuckerberg himself was feted for ‘bringing the world together’ by Facebook users. ‘Mark Sir’ was flooded with anniversary wishes. And his anniversary post received 16 thousand comments and was shared 10 thousand times within 20 hours.

But as the NYT video demonstrated, there is increasing criticism of the business model of Facebook, of unethical breaches of privacy and data and more and more people have begun wondering whether Facebook has been good for humanity. Zuckerberg of course is clear that since Facebook largely replaced traditional media for content, tradional media and newspapers are hitting back at him.

Psychologist and behavioural scientist Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, recalled that in the 1930s in Britain, before the outbreak of the second world war, Lord Beaverbrook, media baron, wrote to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain seeking clarification of Britain’s policy towards Germany.

Media barons even then were primarily interested in making money. But they were also interested in the news, and understood their role in educating public opinion and upholding freedom. But he cannot imagine Mark Zuckerberg calling up the White House to seek clarification on a policy, Gladwell said, adding, “And that’s the problem. Platforms are only as socially useful as their owners want them to be.”