Facebook, India controversy amid hate speech and social media clamp down

India controversy with Facebook continues as human rights organisations protest against hate speech against Muslims.

CAPE TOWN, March 31 (ANA) – Facebook has announced that it is taking measures to curb hate speech and misinformation in India.

“We recognise that there are certain types of content, such as hate speech, that could lead to imminent, offline harm,” Facebook said in a statement posted on March 30.

India has been clamping down on social media due to recent uprisings across the nation.

Senior Indian government officials recently told the Economic Times that the government wants every message sent through WhatsApp to be assigned an alphanumeric hash.

“The government is willing to work with WhatsApp to come up with a solution to enable traceability of message originators without breaking encryption,” unnamed officials said according to tech news organisation BGR.

With over 500 million users, India’s WhatsApp chat service owned by Facebook is one of the most common in the world.

Facebook has been chastised around the world for perceived failures in policing hate speech.

After the Wall Street Journal claimed in August that Facebook refused to delete anti-Muslim remarks made by a politician from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the company has been embroiled in a huge dispute in the South Asian country.

“It’s not good for us, not for people on the platform. There is no constituency that benefits from hate speech,” India’s Facebook managing director Ajit Mohan said to The Times of India.

More than 40 human rights organisations from around the world have written to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, requesting that India’s public policy chief Ankhi Das be fired for anti-Muslim comments on social media platforms.

“It’s important to highlight that the public policy team that Ankhi leads as part of my team is separate from the content policy team that enforces these decisions,” Mohan said.

Facebook has committed to reducing hate speech across its platforms, according to Al Jazeera.

“To decrease the risk of problematic content going viral in these states and potentially to incite violence ahead of or during the election, we will significantly reduce the distribution of content that our proactive detection technology identifies as likely hate speech or violence and incitement,” Facebook said.

Facebook also stated that it decided to have generated Election Day updates in order to provide voters with reliable details and enable them to share with their friends on Facebook and WhatsApp.

African News Agency (ANA); Editing by Naomi Mackay