Why Social Media Wants You Angry
IN June 2019, during the first Parliament session after the BJP’s return to power at the Centre with an enhanced majority, Derek O’Brien of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) raised four questions in the Rajya Sabha that suggested that the saffron party had won the general election by “creating a culture of digital mobs, conditioning minds and spreading fake news”. In short, he alleged that the BJP’s victory was aided by social media manipulation. Fourteen months on, allegations by O’Brien have hit the ruling party again following foreign media reports about how social media giant Facebook has been allegedly favouring the BJP. A report by The Wall Street Journal details how Ankhi Das, Facebook’s public policy director for India and south and central Asia, failed to take down Telangana BJP MLA T. Raja Singh’s account despite his transgression of hate-speech norms.
Another report by Buzzfeed News details the allegations made by Sophie Zhang, a data scientist recently fired by Facebook, in a 6,600-word memo this August criticising the company for overlooking evidence that the platform was used to sway public opinion and manipulate elections globally. Among various examples, she mentioned a “politically-sophisticated” network attempting to influence the Delhi assembly election in February. Zhang did not disclose the identity of the network.
Referring to Raja Singh’s account, which Facebook eventually took down, the company’s India MD Ajit Mohan said in an interview to The Times of India: “If it’s the speech of an elected official, the idea is that the voters and constituents should be able to make a call for themselves in terms of the nature of that speech...we should not be in a position, which is possible, of censorship of speech from elected officials or political leaders. But having said that, there is no exception for hate speech and, therefore, even in this case, going back to 2018, we have taken down content that violated our community standards on the platform.”
In response to Zhang’s allegations,
