IT Correspondent
New Delhi, September 4:
Amid controversy over its alleged bias in implementing its own hate speech rules in India, Face Book has banned BJP leader T Raja Singh from its platforms for “violating its policy on content promoting violence and date”.
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. The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove his account,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
In a video message, Raja Singh claimed he did not have a Facebook account since April 2019 and that the pages the social networking site now banned might have been created by his followers.
The MLA also claimed that leaders like Rahul Gandhi made ‘false’ statements against the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi using social media platforms and demanded that accounts of Congress and AIMIM should be deleted from social networking sites after research.
The action against T Raja Singh came after “The Wall Street Journal” alleged that Facebook violated its own hate speech rules in favour of some individuals, including those associated with the BJP. This was done after opposition from Ankhi Das, head of public policy at Facebook India. However Das had reasoned that punishing violations by politicians from the BJP “would damage the company’s business prospects in the country”.The WSJ report had also highlighted posts by Singh that labelled “Muslims as traitors” and asked that “Rohingya refugees in India should be short.
A separate report by WSJ said Das, over the past years, had shown support for the BJP via posts in a Facebook group for employees, while disparaging the opposition. For instance, the day before the BJP won the 2014 national election, Das said, “We lit a fire to his social media campaign and the rest is of course history”. Besides in a separate post on the defeat of the Congress, she wrote: “It’s taken 30 years of grassroots work to rid India of state socialism finally”.
Responding to the allegations, Facebook India Vice-President and Managing Director Ajit Mohan had said that they were “non-partisan” and denounced hate and bigotry in any form.
“There is no place for hate speech on our platform. We have an impartial approach to dealing with content and are strongly governed by our community standards. We enforce these policies globally without regard to anyone’s political position, party affiliation or religious and cultural belief,” he had said.
On Wednesday, Facebook India officials were grilled by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology on safeguarding citizens’ rights and prevention of misuse of social/online news media platforms, including special emphasis on women’s security in the digital space. Facebook India officials, including Mohan, were caught in the middle of a shouting match between the Opposition and the BJP members as each side blamed the social media giant for alleged bias towards the other.
