By Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz
In Facebook posts and public appearances, Indian politician T.
Raja Singh has said Rohingya Muslim immigrants should be shot,
called Muslims traitors and threatened to raze mosques.
Facebook Inc. employees charged with policing the platform were
watching. By March of this year, they concluded Mr. Singh not only
had violated the company's hate-speech rules but qualified as
dangerous, a designation that takes into account a person's
off-platform activities, according to current and former Facebook
employees familiar with the matter.
Given India's history of communal violence and recent religious
tensions, they argued, his rhetoric could lead to real-world
violence, and he should be permanently banned from the company's
platforms world-wide, according to the current and former
employees, a punishment that in the U.S. has been doled out to
radio host Alex Jones, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and
numerous white supremacist organizations.
Yet Mr. Singh, a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's
Hindu nationalist party, is still active on Facebook and Instagram,
where he has hundreds of thousands of followers. The company's top
public-policy executive in the country, Ankhi Das, opposed applying
the hate-speech rules to Mr. Singh and at least three other Hindu
nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting
or participating in violence, said the current and former
employees.
Ms. Das, whose job also includes lobbying India's government on
Facebook's behalf, told staff members that punishing violations by
politicians from Mr. Modi's party would damage the company's
business prospects in the country, Facebook's biggest global market
by number of users, the current and former employees said.
Facebook faces a monumental challenge policing hate speech
across the enormous volume of content posted to its platforms
world-wide. The way it has applied its hate-speech rules to
prominent Hindu nationalists in India, though, suggests that
political considerations also enter into the calculus.
"A core problem at Facebook is that one policy org is
responsible for both the rules of the platform and keeping
governments happy," Facebook's former chief security officer, Alex
Stamos, now director of Stanford University's Internet Observatory,
wrote on Twitter in May. He was referencing a Wall Street Journal
article about Facebook executives halting internal efforts to make
the site less divisive in the U.S. amid concerns that potential
changes might be perceived as partisan. People who have worked in
Facebook's public-policy department said they agreed with Mr.
Stamos's assertion.
How Facebook polices content has emerged as a major issue in the
U.S., where the company faces regular accusations of political
bias. Some high-profile advertisers recently boycotted the platform
over its handling of hateful content. Facebook says it doesn't
tolerate efforts to use its platforms to instigate violence
anywhere in the world. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been
trying to reassure employees and advertisers in the U.S. that the
company won't let its platform be used to incite violence or
interfere with the democratic process.
"People should be able to see what politicians say" on Facebook,
Mr. Zuckerberg said in May when asked about President Trump's
online activity, but "there are lines, and we will enforce
them."
The current and former Facebook employees said Ms. Das's
intervention on behalf of Mr. Singh is part of a broader pattern of
favoritism by Facebook toward Mr. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and
Hindu hard-liners.
A Facebook spokesman, Andy Stone, acknowledged that Ms. Das had
raised concerns about the political fallout that would result from
designating Mr. Singh a dangerous individual, but said her
opposition wasn't the sole factor in the company's decision to let
Mr. Singh remain on the platform. The spokesman said Facebook is
still considering whether a ban is warranted.
The spokesman said Facebook prohibits hate speech and violence
globally "without regard to anyone's political position or party
affiliation," adding that it took down content that praised
violence earlier this year during deadly protests in New Delhi.
Neither Ms. Das nor Mr. Singh nor a spokesman for his political
party, the BJP, responded to requests for comment. A spokesman for
the prime minister's office declined to comment.
Facebook sometimes adapts its policies to meet political
realities in key markets. In Germany, Facebook agreed to abide by
stricter hate-speech rules than in the U.S. or elsewhere. In
Singapore, where its Asia operations are based, it has agreed to
append a "correction notice" to news stories deemed false by the
government. And in Vietnam, it agreed to restrict access to
dissident political content deemed illegal in exchange for the
government ending its practice of disrupting Facebook's local
servers, which had slowed the platform to a crawl.
India is a vital market for Facebook, which isn't allowed to
operate in China, the only other nation with more than one billion
people. India has more Facebook and WhatsApp users than any other
country, and Facebook has chosen it as the market in which to
introduce payments, encryption and initiatives to tie its products
together in new ways that Mr. Zuckerberg has said will occupy
Facebook for the next decade. In April, Facebook said it would
spend $5.7 billion on a new partnership with an Indian telecom
operator to expand operations in the country -- its biggest foreign
investment.
In June, India banned TikTok, a Chinese video app, amid tensions
with China. Facebook, too, has encountered resistance from Indian
regulators.
Its proposal to provide a free, Facebook-centric
telecommunications service called "Free Basics" was blocked in 2016
on the grounds that it violated net neutrality, the concept that
all traffic on the internet should be treated equally. The
company's plans to launch WhatsApp payments nationwide have been
stalled for two years as it awaits government approvals.
Ms. Das joined Facebook in 2011. As public-policy head for
India, South and Central Asia, she oversees a team that decides
what content is allowed on the platform., one of the former
employees said.
That team took no action after BJP politicians posted content
accusing Muslims of intentionally spreading the coronavirus,
plotting against the nation and waging a "love jihad" campaign by
seeking to marry Hindu women, that former employee said.
Ms. Das has provided the BJP with favorable treatment on
election-related issues, current and former employees said.
In April of last year, days before voting began in India's
general election, Facebook announced it had taken down inauthentic
pages tied to Pakistan's military and the Congress Party, the BJP's
main rival party. But it didn't disclose it also removed pages with
false news tied to the BJP, because Ms. Das intervened, according
to former Facebook employees.
In 2017, Ms. Das wrote an essay, illustrated with Facebook's
thumbs-up logo, praising Mr. Modi. It was posted to his website and
featured in his mobile app.
On her own Facebook page, Ms. Das shared a post from a former
police official, who said he is Muslim, in which he called India's
Muslims traditionally a "degenerate community" for whom "Nothing
except purity of religion and implementation of Shariah
matter."
The post "spoke to me last night," Ms. Das wrote. "As it should
to [the] rest of India."
Mr. Singh, a BJP state-level lawmaker, has drawn national
attention for the stridency of his anti-Muslim rhetoric and his
stated efforts to form a vigilante army to hunt down
"traitors."
He has used Facebook, where his own page and those dedicated to
him have more than 400,000 followers, to say that Muslims who kill
cows -- animals revered by Hindus -- should be slaughtered like
them. He has posted a photo of himself with a drawn sword alongside
text declaring that Hindus' existence depends on taking
extrajudicial action against Muslims.
Facebook's safety staff concluded that the lawmaker's rhetoric
warranted his permanent ban under Facebook's "Dangerous Individuals
and Organizations" policy, the current and former employees said.
Applied to white supremacists such as Richard Spencer in the U.S.,
it results in the company's harshest punishment -- removal from the
platform.
Facebook deleted some of Mr. Singh's postings after the Journal
asked about them. It said Mr. Singh no longer is permitted to have
an official, verified account, designated with a blue check mark
badge.
Another BJP legislator, a member of parliament named Anantkumar
Hegde, has posted essays and cartoons to his Facebook page alleging
that Muslims are spreading Covid-19 in the country in a conspiracy
to wage "Corona Jihad." Human-rights groups say such unfounded
allegations, which violate Facebook's hate speech rules barring
direct attacks on people based on "protected characteristics" such
as religion, are linked to attacks on Muslims in India, and have
been designated as hate speech by Twitter Inc.
While Twitter has suspended Mr. Hegde's account as a result of
such posts, prompting him to call for an investigation of the
company, Facebook took no action until the Journal sought comment
from the company about his "Corona Jihad" posts. Facebook removed
some of them on Thursday. Mr. Hegde didn't respond to a request for
comment.
In February, the former BJP lawmaker Kapil Mishra gave a speech
warning police that if they didn't clear protesters demonstrating
against a citizenship bill that excludes Muslims, his supporters
would do so by force.
Within hours of the videotaped message, which Mr. Mishra
uploaded to Facebook, rioting broke out that left dozens of people
dead. Most of the victims were Muslims, and some of their killings
were organized via Facebook's WhatsApp, according to court
documents filed by police and published in Indian newspapers.
Mr. Zuckerberg cited Mr. Mishra's post, without naming him, in
an employee town hall meeting in June, as an example of the sort of
behavior that the platform wouldn't tolerate from a politician. The
company took down the video post.
Mr. Mishra acknowledged that Facebook had removed the video,
which he said hadn't prompted any violence. He said his postings
don't amount to hate speech, and that he believes neither he nor
the BJP receive preferential treatment from Facebook.
Facebook took down some of Mr. Mishra's posts on Thursday after
the Journal sought comment on them.
Data from social research firm Crowdtangle shows that within two
months of the video of the speech being posted, the engagement for
Mr. Mishra's Facebook page grew from a couple hundred thousand
interactions a month to more than 2.5 million.
Write to Newley Purnell at newley.purnell@wsj.com and Jeff
Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 14, 2020 13:02 ET (17:02 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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