The opposition Congress on Tuesday wrote to the social media giant’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to set up a time-bound ‘high-level inquiry’ into its leadership in India and their operations and put in place a new team until completion of the internal probe.
Thus came after the party demanded a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe into charges that Facebook’s India team meted out favourable treatment to the ruling BJP, according to reports.
In the letter to Zuckerberg, Congress general secretary in charge of organization K C Venugopal also asked Facebook to publish ‘all instances of hate speech posts since 2014 that were allowed on the platform’.
This comes days after The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook’s top public policy executive in India, citing business reasons, didn’t apply ‘hate-speech rules’ to at least four individuals and groups linked with BJP who were ‘flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence’.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi raised the issue on Twitter.
“We cannot allow any manipulation of our hard-earned democracy through bias, fake news & hate speech. As exposed by WSJ, Facebook’s involvement in peddling fake and hate news needs to be questioned by all Indians,” he tweeted.
