Facebook is in the eye of a political storm in India after claims it failed to take action against hate speech posts by a Hindu nationalist lawmaker out of fear for its business interests.
The lawmaker in question, T. Raja Singh, on Monday claimed his account had been hacked, the New Indian Express reported.
The Wall Street Journal report last week said Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had opposed applying hate-speech rules to the lawmaker and other Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) individuals and allied groups who had been flagged internally.
The executive, Ankhi Das, told staff members that punishing violations by politicians from India’s ruling party would damage the company’s business prospects in India, the newspaper reported.
This was even after employees concluded Singh had violated its rules, the Journal said, citing current and former Facebook staff.
Meanwhile, Das has filed a police complaint in New Delhi saying she is receiving death threats following the media report.
“I am extremely disturbed by the relentless harassment meted out to me,” Das said in her complaint, according to the Hindu newspaper.
A spokesman for the Delhi Police did not respond to calls and text messages from Reuters.
Das and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on the police complaint.
Without commenting directly on the Journal report, Facebook said Monday it would always prohibit “hate speech and content that incites violence”, and would “enforce these policies globally without regard to anyone’s political position or party affiliation”.
“While we know there is more to do, we’re making progress on enforcement and conduct regular audits of our process to ensure fairness and accuracy,” a spokeswoman added.
Lawmaker Raja Singh insisted Monday that his Facebook account had been hacked and someone was “deliberately trying to project me as a dangerous person all over the world.”
“Many pages and IDs are being run on my name on social media platforms without my consent,” he told the New Indian Express.
For Facebook, which has over 300 million users in India, the controversy comes months after it invested $5.7 billion in the digital unit of India‘s Reliance Industries.
The company was also seen close to receiving permission to launch a payments service on WhatsApp, which also counts India as its biggest market with more than 400 million users.
India‘s main opposition Congress has seized on the WSJ story to seek a parliamentary investigation of Facebook employees’ alleged ties with Modi’s BJP.
On Sunday, Congress said on Twitter, “Millions of Indians are controlled and manipulated by BJP through Facebook,” and WhatsApp.
The party claimed there was “bias and alignment” of the Facebook India team in favour of the BJP and its allies.
“They spread fake news and hatred through it and use it to influence the electorate,” tweeted senior party figure Rahul Gandhi.
BJP lawmakers in turn accused Facebook of censoring nationalist voices, with lawmaker and former minister Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore in a column in the Indian Express newspaper on Monday accused Facebook of being a “Left-Congress-leaning platform.”
“This storm in a teacup is merely an exercise to browbeat Facebook for ‘allowing’ certain opinions to even exist,” Rathore wrote.
“There are examples of current and former Facebook executives with links to the former government and opposition parties, and some of them have been openly critical of the prime minister as well. To accuse them of being pro-BJP is laughable.”
Tejasvi Surya, another BJP lawmaker and a member of a parliamentary committee on information technology, said many people had complained to him that Facebook was “unfairly censoring many nationalist, pro-India or pro-Hindu voices”, and that he would take up the matter with relevant authorities.
