RSS, BJP major purveyors of hate and violence, says Facebook whistleblower
The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s disclosures in recent days have brought to the fore once again the RSS-BJP combine’s efforts to communalise the country using hate and violence.
The Facebook whistleblower’s disclosures to the US Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which hit the headlines across the world recently, have several references to the promotion of divisions and ethnic violence in India, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) features prominently in them.
Frances Haugen, the former Facebook data scientist, said that accounts related to the ideological fountainhead of India’s ruling BJP promoted “fear mongering, anti-Muslim narratives”. Not only that, on Facebook’s side, a lack of Indian language editors led to unchecked hate speech on the platform.
Another disclosure she made was that the BJP uses Single User Multiple Accounts for propaganda that affects neighbouring Bangladesh as well.
She further that the global social media giant “promotes global division and ethnic violence”, including in India.
Haugen quit Facebook in May, and in September, filed at least eight complaints with the SEC, the markets watchdog in the US. She went public with her allegations on CBS News earlier this week and later testified to the US Congress.
A leaked internal FB document, “Adversarial Harmful Networks – India Case Study”, is cited in one of the SEC complaints uploaded on CBS News’ website.
An excerpt says: “RSS (Indian nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) Users, Groups, and Pages promote fear mongering, anti-Muslim narratives targeted pro-Hindu populations with V&I (violent and incendiary) intent …. There were a number of dehumanizing posts comparing Muslims to ‘pigs’ and ‘dogs’ and misinformation (claiming that men have been urged to rape their female family members).
“Our lack of Hindi and Bengali classifiers means much of this (anti-Muslim) content is never flagged or actioned ….”
Last year, The Wall Street Journal had quoted unnamed current and former Facebook staff who had claimed that the platform allowed posts by BJP legislators that incited violence, on the advice of Ankhi Das, its then public policy director for South and Central Asia, who was linked to the RSS.
An undated internal survey by Facebook, cited by Haugen, revealed that the posts that got the most views were fake.
“40% of Top VPV (View Port Views, or impressions) Civic Posters in West Bengal Were Fake/Inauthentic/fake. The highest-VPV user to be assessed as inauthentic had more than 30M accrued in the L28 (last 28 days),” she said in one of the complaints.
Viral shares included an “out-of-context” video by an Indian politician to stir anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan sentiments.
Another leaked internal document titled “Lotus Mahal” was cited to suggest that the BJP encouraged its members to have multiple Facebook accounts, which is not illegal but is discouraged by the social media platform as the trend is linked to provocative content.
The excerpt in the complaint says: “BJP IT Cell worker (shared) coordinated messaging instructions to supporters with a copypasta campaign … targeting politically-sensitive tags .… 103 suspicious entities across IN & BD (India and Bangladesh).”
Facebook, though, told a major news outlet a few days back that it had made significant investments to detect hate speech, as a consequence of which its “prevalence”, meaning “the amount of the content people actually see”, had come down “by almost 50 per cent in the last three quarters and it’s now down to 0.05 per cent of all content viewed.”
