Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Oct.25: The Congress blasted Facebook on Monday, maintaining its claim that the social media giant swayed Indian elections in favour of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and sought an investigation into the subject.
“We seek a Joint Parliamentary Committee to investigate Facebook’s role in influencing our elections, in attempting to compromise and undermine our democracy, and in attempting to mould public opinion through bogus posts,” said Pawan Khera, a spokesman for the Congress. He dubbed the business as “Fake-book.”
The incident began after The New York Times published internal Facebook papers showing “a struggle with misinformation, hate speech, and celebrations of violence” in India. On the social media network, there are organisations and pages “replete with inflammatory and inaccurate anti-Muslim information,” according to Facebook researchers.
According to the New York Times, a Facebook researcher created an account in February 2019 to see how the social media network would seem for someone living in Kerala. “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,” the New York Times reported.
Internal records, according to the study, show how bots and phoney accounts linked to India’s “ruling party and opposition figures” wreaked havoc on the country’s national elections.
Khera noted the company’s reluctance to ban the Bajrang Dal, despite an internal study labelling the Hindu nationalist group a “dangerous” organisation that “would enrage the ruling party,” according to the Wall Street Journal. He wondered why the government had not spoken out against Facebook.
During the 2020 Delhi riots and the West Bengal elections this summer, Khera accused Facebook of silence. “They are knowingly promoting the ruling party’s objectives and ideology,” he said.
