By Jeff Horwitz and Newley Purnell
A Facebook Inc. executive at the center of a political storm in
India made internal postings over several years detailing her
support for the now ruling Hindu nationalist party and disparaging
its main rival, behavior some staff saw as conflicting with the
company's pledge to remain neutral in elections around the
world.
In one of the messages, Ankhi Das, head of public policy in the
country, posted the day before Narendra Modi swept to victory in
India's 2014 national elections: "We lit a fire to his social media
campaign and the rest is of course history."
"It's taken thirty years of grassroots work to rid India of
state socialism finally," Ms. Das wrote in a separate post on the
defeat of the Indian National Congress party, praising Mr. Modi as
the "strongman" who had broken the former ruling party's hold. Ms.
Das called Facebook's top global elections official, Katie Harbath,
her "longest fellow traveler" in the company's work with his
campaign. In a photo, Ms. Das stood, smiling, between Mr. Modi and
Ms. Harbath.
Ms. Das's posts, which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal,
haven't been previously reported. Some Facebook employees said the
sentiments and actions described by Ms. Das conflicted with the
company's longstanding neutrality pledge.
The posts cover the years 2012 to 2014 and were made to a
Facebook group designed for employees in India, though it was open
to anyone in the company globally who wanted to join. Several
hundred Facebook employees were members of the group during those
years.
Ms. Das is already at the center of a political outcry in India
over Facebook's handling of hate speech on the platform, following
a Journal article earlier this month. That article showed that Ms.
Das earlier this year opposed moves to ban from the platform a
politician from Mr. Modi's party whose anti-Muslim comments
violated Facebook's rules.
From its earliest days when it morphed from a college social
network into a global political force, Facebook has presented
itself as a neutral platform that doesn't favor any party or
viewpoint. The company's head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, has
said the company's role is to provide the court, not "pick up a
racket and start playing." Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has
repeatedly stressed his position that the company should remain
politically neutral, including this year when he defended his
decision not to act against provocative posts from U.S. President
Trump.
Facebook on Tuesday said the posts by Ms. Das don't show
inappropriate bias.
"These posts are taken out of context and don't represent the
full scope of Facebook's efforts to support the use of our platform
by parties across the Indian political spectrum," spokesman Andy
Stone said.
Ms. Das didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. She has
apologized to colleagues for sharing a post described in the
previous Journal article, in which she approvingly reposted an
essay from a former Indian police official who said the country's
Muslims have historically been "a degenerate community."
As in the U.S., Facebook's India-based public policy team serves
two functions. Staffers make and enforce the platform's rules about
what is and isn't allowed to be posted, and they represent the
company's interests before governments. Critics both outside the
company and inside have increasingly raised concerns about how
those roles may conflict.
Opposition lawmakers in India are seeking to question Facebook
executives following the Journal's recent article, and Facebook
employees are pressing company leadership to investigate why the
company hasn't done more to address toxic content in a country with
a recent history of lynchings and communal violence. A nonpartisan
group of 54 former civil servants in India on Monday circulated an
open letter to Mr. Zuckerberg, asking him to audit the
implementation of Facebook's hate-speech policy in the country.
A spokesman called the employee requests "a prime example of the
type of open culture we value at Facebook" and said the company
stands against anti-Muslim bigotry.
India is a key market for Facebook because its nascent internet
economy represents mammoth room for growth. Facebook in April said
it was investing $5.7 billion on a new tie-up with an Indian
telecom operator, its biggest foreign investment to date. Facebook
India reports directly to Facebook's top executives in Menlo Park,
Calif., exempting Ms. Das's team from regular oversight by both
Facebook's leadership in Asia and Facebook's global public policy
team.
Ms. Das arrived at Facebook in 2011, a time when the social
media giant was eager to demonstrate its utility in politics. It
rolled out training for several Indian political parties on how
best to use the platform to mobilize supporters. One was Mr. Modi's
2012 campaign for re-election as chief minister of the western
Indian state of Gujarat.
Mr. Modi's political career had been sullied by deadly religious
riots in the state in 2002, soon after he came to power. Critics
accused him of not doing enough to stop the violence that killed
more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, allegations Mr. Modi
denied. A court in 2013 said there wasn't enough evidence to
prosecute him, but he was barred on human-rights grounds from
visiting the U.S. before his election as prime minister.
"Success in our Gujarat Campaign," Ms. Das wrote of the training
of Mr. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party team in October of 2012,
noting the campaign was close to reaching a million fans on
Facebook.
Mr. Modi soon launched his campaign for national office, with
Facebook again offering training and assistance. Her Facebook
colleague, Ms. Harbath -- a Republican -- wrote that Ms. Das
characterized Mr. Modi as "the George W. Bush of India," according
to a 2013 internal post featuring a photo of the two women and the
future prime minister. Facebook said it offered similar meetings
and training to other parties during Ms. Harbath's time in
India.
Ms. Das made her sentiments on the race clear. When a fellow
staffer noted in response to one of her internal posts that the
BJP's primary opponent, the Indian National Congress, had a larger
following on Facebook than Mr. Modi's individual page, Ms. Das
responded: "Don't diminish him by comparing him with INC. Ah well
-- let my bias not show!!!"
Internally, Ms. Das presented the company's work with the BJP as
benefiting Facebook as well.
"We've been lobbying them for months to include many of our top
priorities," she said of the BJP's official platform, noting that
the document was littered with the word "technology" and appeared
to embrace Facebook's desire for an expanded but less heavily
regulated internet. "Now they just need to go and win the
elections," she wrote.
By the end of the 2014 national campaign, Ms. Das shared with
colleagues internal BJP election predictions of a Modi victory that
she said she had obtained from a "senior leader and close friend in
BJP."
The Journal previously reported that Ms. Das had intervened to
prevent Facebook from calling out the BJP as it did Congress for
operating networks of fake pages and accounts during India's 2019
national elections. Facebook denied that its handling of the
announcement was biased in the BJP's favor.
In another incident, which hasn't been previously reported,
Facebook declined to act after discovering that the BJP was
circumventing its political ad transparency requirements, according
to people familiar with the matter.
The rules require advertisers to verify their identities and
disclose them to users. In addition to buying Facebook ads in its
own name, the BJP was also found to have spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars through newly created organizations that
didn't disclose the party's role, the people said.
Facebook neither took down the pages nor flagged the ads.
Instead, it privately raised the matter with the BJP, according to
former employees in both India and the U.S., where the decision was
discussed.
Facebook's Mr. Stone Tuesday said that Facebook decided not to
act after concluding that its rules hadn't been specific enough.
The company said it has decided to review that decision following
the Journal's questions this past week. A spokesman for the BJP
didn't respond to a request for comment.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com and Newley Purnell
at newley.purnell@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 30, 2020 13:57 ET (17:57 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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