"Shreya Singhal v. Union of India shields Twitter from any liability for failing to take down content unless a court order is passed asking it to do the same."
Those are better free speech protections than in Germany, where after a mere complaint (not court order) platforms are liable for up to 5 million euro if they fail to remove illegal posts within 7 days, and "obviously illegal" posts within 24 hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act
It is a strategically risky move for Facebook to take an active role in shaping India's political landscape. I imagine that the Indian population might object to American companies deciding what is and isn't appropriate to discuss.
FB's motivation at the end of day is money, they will cater to demands of any ruling org. For long time Zuck was doing trips to PRC to cozy up to CCP.
I went through the article and while I don't rule out the possibility of ideological bias in an org, it seems that they are reaching for it a bit. Like the first instance itself that was mentioned in the article.
> Facebook said in a statement to TIME. “We failed to remove upon initial review, which was a mistake on our part.”
I am not a FB employee but if they have a two step process for removing some posts and say the second step in some cases is creating an issue on the ticketing system. By Occam's razor the simplest explanation can be easily that what FB is saying is the truth, in mid/big companies, issue trackers can easily be the places where things can go to die.
I have personally seen issues being left unaddressed for years. It can happen, and if we pick selective instances to paint a story, it might not be the complete picture.
Though as I mentioned earlier as well, they very well can have a bias if they have hired individuals with the same ideological background which is true for all types of orgs including old media houses.
There's more concrete evidence of Facebook's political bias in the Wall Street Journal report mentioned in the article.
> Yet Mr. Singh, a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, is still active on Facebook and Instagram, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers. The company’s top public-policy executive in the country, Ankhi Das, opposed applying the hate-speech rules to Mr. Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence, said the current and former employees.
> Ms. Das, whose job also includes lobbying India’s government on Facebook’s behalf, told staff members that punishing violations by politicians from Mr. Modi’s party would damage the company’s business prospects in the country, Facebook’s biggest global market by number of users, the current and former employees said.
Inciting ethnic violence was one of the official reasons why TikTok was banned in the country, so surely nobody can object to applying the same Indian standards to Facebook communication, right? Not to mention India already has hate speech laws, so I don't see how Facebook enforcing them on their platform would be anyhting else than complying with... Indian law.
People incite ethnic violence regardless of the platform they use to spread their message. Hate speech laws in India just seem to be a convenient way for the government to crack down on websites and services it doesn’t like at arbitrary times.
I've always wondered why Facebook's role in the US elections is such a hotly debated topic but Facebook's role in the elections of all the other democracies in the world is not touched upon at all.
It's certainly a topic for discussion in the other democracies. Before COVID-19 sent everything haywire, Canada's parliament was holding sessions on the question of American electoral interference on social media.
Once it's back on track, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's management have a good chance of having arrest warrants issued if they don't start actually testifying and cooperating.
Well, that's because news coverage and forums are very heavily biased towards reporting on the US. Even in non-US countries.
There has been some discussion of the effects of Cambridge Analytica on the Brexit referendum and UK elections. However, in the UK, traditional media ownership and cronyism is more of a serious problem.
>Indian population is brainwashed by the party with which FB sided
Just because the Indian population has realized what rubbish the Indian Congress party, it's affiliates were ( basically a KGB satellite) doesn't mean they are brainwashed.
Just because Indian population doesn't like the game where all the money is for select few and rest are all poor ( communism) doesn't mean it's brainwashed.
Just because Indian population doesn't reward the those who refuse to condemn the ethnic cleansing of pagans/non monotheists doesn't mean it's brainwashed.
Just people you can label Indian population as brainwashed doesn't mean it is.
Name one quarter under Modi govt where GDP was above 9.9
I van quote 2 quarters under Congress when GDP was 10
Under Modiji unemployment is at a 45yr high!
GDP is at a 5yr low and the economy is being driven underground and the new lows are beating the old lows with utter incompetence shown by the central govt.
Also we are now the #1 country by new cases. We are the only Asian country where Corona is out of control
If Congress was rubbish and we voted thes morons to power, I want rubbish congress back
"I imagine that the Indian population might object to American companies..."
Does the average Indian person even consciously reflect on Facebook being an American company? I get the impression that for so much of the developing world where Facebook/Whatsapp/Instagram are just about the only internet people know (because these sites don’t count against their mobile data, because they don’t even have e-mail and this is the only way they communicate with people, etc.), people don’t even think about where all this infrastructure comes from. It’s just “the internet”, and it exists with no particular origin or nationality like the air they breathe or the rain that falls from the sky.
I don't think this would be true just for developing world. Till the whole Tiktok-Trump thing started, did teens using Tiktok even knew where the owner was from. It has an English name, English language localization.
Hard to take this comment seriously in a country where about 50% have access to the internet, very likely 100% of influential people have access to the internet, and very likely 100% of people are 1 degree of separation from someone who has access to the internet.
They don't take it seriously. Just the fact that everybody is online doesn't mean they know how to navigate the internet. Many are there for porn, or shitty memes
It’s not that different from any other country. Only a small fraction of people from any country cares about what’s actually going on in the intersection of politics and the internet.
Yes, and it doesn't go well. Twitter(India) was summoned by a parliamentary panel when a group accused them of being biased against right-wing accounts.
Facebook is no stranger to picking political winners and losers. In 2016, it seems to have bet the farm on a Trump victory (By being, and then continuing to be incredibly lax on enforcing its rules against his account.)
It knows which side its bread is buttered, and is not going to rock the boat against a sitting president.
It's a geopolitical issue, probably not one of hate speech.
India is not concerned about US Government spying on them, so much.
All large Chinese companies have strong ties to the CCP (they have internal staffers who are party members, essentially acting as internal party oversight). Ergo, TT is definitely an organ of the state. It's just a matter of 'how much' in practicality.
FYI to be more clear - the Chinese Communist Party has party officials placed within corporate organisations in order to maintain control, and to require businesses to adhere to CCP Policy.
As of 2019 - 70% of Chinese business had 'CCP organs' placed within the company for oversight, and Xi wants to put it to at least 95% very soon. [1]
From the Guardian: "Central Organisation Department, the party’s personnel body, found that 68% of China’s private companies had party bodies by 2016, and 70% of foreign enterprises. Although these figures sound high, they don’t match the targets the party has set for itself. In Xi’s old stamping ground of Zhejiang, for example, officials set a target in August 2018 to have cells inside 95% of private businesses."
There is no ambiguity here: while the state may allow private enterprises to manage day-to-day affairs, all private businesses are subject to controls and scrutiny by the CCP - directly from agents within the company - so that they meet CCP objectives.
Given that, all Chinese companies are de-facto CCP companies from the perspective of national security and strategic policy.
The parallel would be Trump putting a 'special team' of CIA or Republicans inside every American company to ensure oversight of his agenda.
This is very material to the nature of Social Media operations and global influence.
Edit: which is why India et. al. are going to be much more concerned about TikTok than other apps and that the primary concern is not issues over speech.
Possibly because FB and WA have been toeing the party line (as it has been toeing the Trump line in the US). TikTok might have been less than sycophantic towards the ruling party here in India.
It helps that one can use it to play to their gallery by appearing to stick it to China. There had been recent incursions by the Chinese well inside Indian borders. The ruling party has been trying to cover that up and needed some token resistance to showcase.
Given the mutually cuddly relations between PM and Zuckerberg, the ban of TikTok is not really that surprising.
This can only be solved when more and more people understand the threats not just for the present, but for the future.
What Facebook and WhatsApp have enabled are convenient and useful for those in power. So while there may probably be some words here and there, we can’t expect a lot of change on the ground.
Disappointingly, the Indian Supreme Court is also lethargic and chooses to look at more trivial matters than give importance to things that could affect the freedom and political landscape for generations — examples are the Aadhaar petitions, cases against the electoral bonds and other matters not being heard for years. The court may actually find merit in holding this commenter in contempt for criticizing it, as if the judiciary is somehow sacred and beyond any criticism (anyone interested can search online for recent news on what the court is doing).
The effect of “absolute power corrupts absolutely” is seen in many corners!
> What Facebook and WhatsApp have enabled are convenient and useful for those in power.
I'm sure they are, but are they more useful than what was before? Facebook & Co have some random element, it's not a one-way-communication device like classic media (TV, radio, newspapers) are/were.
The government has much less control over Facebook. You can't just go in and take it over like you could with a radio station, you can either use it and accept that others can as well, or you can block it in your country, but then you can't use it either.
But those were for individual communication, I understood the parent comment to mean mass media ("useful for those in power"). I don't think the powerful feature of Facebook is the messenger, it's the ability to rapidly disperse information through sharing. IRC & similar communication tools weren't made for that.
WhatsApp is a hybrid, I suppose, but even there I think the share/forward feature is what drives the political usefulness, which is also why they're limiting that for some media, so you can't spread messages as easily (if it has been forwarded five times, you can only forward it individually, not to multiple contacts/chats, from what I understand).
What Facebook and WhatsApp have enabled are convenient and useful for those in power.
The other side of the coin is that people being able to record and stream police in real time has exposed corruption in the justice system that the mainstream media has been ignoring for decades. The MSM use to never question whether police were being honest.
Are you sure about this? From what I gather the current ruling dispensation in India is opposite of left, and Jack Dorsey has stated in the past about Twitter having left leaning bias. [1] Might not translate to their India operations but I strongly doubt it wouldn't.
BJP, India’s right wing party, has super majority seats in parliament and looks to be the only relevant party in the foreseeable future. So I think if they want to deal with India, they’d have to deal with BJP regardless of their political leanings.
Also, FB's proximity to the mega corporation that's known to be very friendly to the ruling party. FB's WhatsApp pay getting clearances / approvals soon after they made a large payment to Jio Platforms.
Timeline:
26Nov2019:
India puts WhatsApp's impending payments service on ice due to data localisation fracas.
Both the security breach by Pegasus malware and WhatsApp's reluctance to adhere to India's data localisation norms have caused it to sit on the sidelines of one of the hottest digital payments markets in the world. [1]
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/india-puts-whatsapps-impending...
India is a very lucrative market for FB and other companies.
1 billion people, 2 billion eyes. No privacy laws, can easily share and sell data, govt is in the hands of Reliance (in which FB, Google and others are all investing a lot), most Indians are just getting used to the vast internet and are easily tricked.
Ideally they should have some morality to put basic human rights and safety above profits. Even from long term perspective if they continue to ignore hate speech against Islam on their platform I am sure they would lose a lot of users.
They won't. You don't know the kind of nationalism that exists in India. Just check out twitter.com/explore every night via an Indian IP. It's full of hate speech against Hindus and muslims. Some random guy/girl tweets some shit against a religion. All the media/bots/politicians jump on it and blame it on each other. Everybody is outraged by tiny things, they don't know to ignore things.
Indian media thrives on these things. Half the nation is jobless/students . Most accounts are paid bots.
The only good thing is that the situation are getting better, as the older gen goes away slowly.
> The only good thing is that the situation are getting better, as the older gen goes away slowly.
I do want to believe you, but most of the time it seems I am clutching at straws. The Hindu right is doing a pretty good job of catching them young and indoctrinating. At the same time there is ton of money flowing in from Saudi Arabia to do the honours for the other side.
Nobody made that claim. The article covers Facebook's repeated failure to promptly remove hate speech against Muslims in India, and that's why this topic is being discussed.
Hate speech against women in India may also be an issue, but that's not what the article is about. The article focuses on hate speech on Facebook against Muslims in India.
It talks about the number of rapes reported daily in India and those numbers are utterly, distressingly and shamefully high. However, I don't see where it indicates hate speech against women in India is an equal if not a bigger issue.
I fail to see anything in that article about hate speech against women, violence against women sure, where does it talk about hate speech and how relevant is that to this HN post. Are you sure you did not get carried away by your personal agenda.
'Islam' is not a monolithic block, and we shouldn't represent it as such. Most hate speech against Muslims or varieties of Islam comes from Islamist fundamentalists and radicals themselves, not anyone with ties to any "ruling party" in India or in the Western world.
Talking about Islamophobic hate content in the context of India, the current ruling party BJP which known for being a Hindu Nationalistic party, along with it's sister organizations "Sangh Parivar", have a history of spreading islamophobia.
You can’t accuse them of Islamophobia or hate content when there’s a long history of Islamic terror attacks in India, attempts to illegally annex territory from India into an Islamic nation (Pakistan trying to claim Kashmir), recent history in splitting India to create separate Islamic nations (Pakistan and Bangladesh), not to mention further brutal history of Islamic (Mughal) conquest and rule.
Why shouldn’t a party in India be Hindu nationalists and recognize the realities of Islam’s persistent threat to their way of life over hundreds of years? There’s no other space on the planet for Hindus other than India. Blind secularism is asking for a culture to disappear and be replaced by the homogeneous modern western culture, ultimately.
threat of terrorism doesnt justify hating the entire community, the policy of the current ruling dispensation is Islamophobic, Islamophobia wont help fight terrorism.
You can see many comments here justifying anti-Muslim actions of the govt by whataboutery. Now imagine that happening at scale on whatsapp/Facebook and MSM.
With most Indian family having access to smartphones, the amount of hatred and brainwashing that happens through this platform is unstoppable. Recently, Hindus were told not to buy from Muslim vendors, saying that Muslims are purposely spreading corona. Hindu sellers were provided with saffron flags for identification. Concentration camps are being built using the same people as workers, who would eventually end up in the camps. MSM openly spews anti-muslim venom during prime time. India is openly heading towards either a genocide or a civil war.
One can try their best to un-brainwash people, but one can't do much against a paid online army of twitter/whatsapp/facebook users.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines like this? We've already asked you once recently. I don't want to ban you, but if you keep posting unsubstantive and/or political-battle-style comments, we're going to have to.
For failure of legislation, judiciary, administration, media in India to protect minority, Facebook is not the primary actor. Indeed minorities failed to get support from top courts in India where habeas corpus (the most fundamental basic right of Freedom in Indian constitution) litigations are pending for over 1 year and constantly being postponed, and the topmost court is busy prosecuting a lawyer with urgency for a tweet. His main offence is to use public interest litigation to help minorities, question govt and courts and bring to the front the tyranny of majoritarian politics of suppression. He is in cross-hairs of the current govt, so it’s one another way to silence him from questioning govt or courts for decisions.
Agree that Facebook should act decisively to say no to things which incites violence and suppress the voice of minority.
The least it can do is to remove people immediately in the company who appear in slightest to promote or ignore hate and violent information on platform resulting in loss of life. Here Facebook is duty bound to act internally within its company to make sure it’s staff are responsible for their actions. I don’t see any of this indeed the whole Facebook team in India who did it are promoted based on research in WSJ and this article. Getting cozy with richest man closer to right wing is just to secure profits and market at the expense of principles.
Also right wing politics in India enjoys a substantial support, especially the Hitler style (reflected in many govt decisions). Facebook is just reflection of what’s in the society at present. Majority of the people are happy that a temple built will make India no. 1 in the world, talks and real actions on COVID-19 has become boring and not important as it inches towards no. 1 in the world for COVID-19 infections.
> * Facebook is just reflection of what’s in the society at present.*
Facebook is a company that makes a profit off of engagement, even if that engagement is driven by hate. Facebook alone chooses what they promote on their platform. It is not some kind of mirror that just reflects what goes on in society, it is a company that distorts the truth, outrages and pushes paid propaganda on its users in order to turn a profit.
That’s the reason mentioned in my comment that Facebook chose profits and market over principles in India based on WSJ research and this article.
In India they choose the side of the govt, political party and an ideology, it’s again a reflection of the kind of staff managing Facebook in India and although they are duty bound to punish such staff they rewarded them and still defending them to secure the market and profits.
The real "Hitler-Style tactics" is not any specific historical injustice, it is the promotion of tribalism and nationalism, dividing people up into "us" (who have been wronged) and "them" (who did the wrong, and therefore deserve to be punished as a group) on the basis of race, religion, etc.
The opposite of Hitlerism is not Jews getting revenge on the Germans, it is liberalism. There is no room for whataboutism, because liberalism is not about showing how "they" are more evil than "us", because there is no "us" and "them".
My grandmom managed to escape from Bangladesh violence, smuggled hidden amongst cattle.
I don't see how that justifies fascist and Hindu supremacist policies in India.
Treatment of Kashmiri pandits is a favorite talking point of the Hindu right. They are remarkably silent about other violent and forced population movement brought about by Hindus upon Hindus. Bengalis evicted violently from Assam did not spend time collectively moping about it but built their life somewhere else.
So talking about the harms of ethnic cleansing is moping in your book? This is an attitude I constantly see among Indian liberals. They ignore all the injustices inflicted on Hindus. Would you consider talking about the Holocaust as moping?
Hindu right talks about Kashmiri Pandits because nobody else does. Can you tell me why we must keep silent about their ethnic cleansing?
> Can you tell me why we must keep silent about their ethnic cleansing?
I cannot because I have not asked anyone to be silent about it. What I find 'moping' is refusal to move on by people who have the wherewithal to do so. Bengalis (my family included) have been persecuted with violence in many places [East Pakistan, Assam, Bihar for example]. I don't see them doing the analogue of Kashmiri pandits.
> Would you consider talking about the Holocaust as moping?
I certainly take issues with portraying Jewish holocaust as something special, and placing that as a talking point that lies above other genocides. I say this in spite of a handmade Anne Frank poster that hangs in my room.
The place where I went to school in the US the local right wing Jewish community raised a big fuss when another community showcased a violent and lethal part of their history using a symbolic display of shoes. Their claim was that genocide and such symbolic displays are an exclusive right that they own. This I totally reject.
After Mumbai 26/11 happened, I went to attend a vigil mourning the death of Jewish people killed in the terror attack. I was quite disappointed by the rhetoric displayed there. Not a word was said about Indian people who were killed in the attack. It was all about how Jewish people have been hounded everywhere. The implication being India is also such a place. This is particularly ironic because Jewish immigrants have enjoyed the greatest goodwill for centuries in India. You would know that Jewish settlements in India go far back in time than European settlements and that anti-Jewish narrative is an European thing that has no counterpart in India.
I generally dislike the narrative 'I am a victimized helpless snowflake who did nobody no wrong' whenever anyone plays that less than truthfully.
Bring the history to light, get reparations when applicable, and move on when one is in a position to do so.
> So it's galling to me when you accuse Hindus of Hitler style tactics when they're the real victims of it.
Stop thinking in terms of "X are the real victims", "Y are the real aggressors". It leads to a never-ending cycle of hatred and violence. Everyone is human, everyone deserves protection, and everyone is capable of doing good and evil at different times and in different places.
GP didn't say "all Hindus" and they definitely didn't say "Hindus outside India", which is who you're talking about.
Your ancestors experienced "persecution of a minority" in their homelands, and that's what GP is also referring to. It is always wrong, no matter who the persecutor is and who the minority is. But it's possible for people of Group A to be the minority in one place and the persecutor in another. Sometimes it's the same individuals, because they want revenge. But often it's people saying "Well what we're doing isn't so bad, did you hear they do X bad thing to our people in other countries?" These are destructive patterns of thought - they corrode societies and nations. Focus on making the place where you live positive, happy, and peaceful instead of pointing fingers.
This comment thread is about India, so GP was talking about persecution of minorities there.
You're wrong in thinking that just because a community is a minority they must be subject to persecution there. That's not necessarily true. If that was the case then Muslim population in India wouldn't have gone up from 9% to 14%. Also Hindus are a majority in India but still Hindus of Indian Kashmir were ethnically cleansed.
Also why should the treatment of Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh shouldn't be up for discussion? All of these are part of the same historical narrative. Just because Muslims created a separate country and expelled most Hindus from there doesn't mean we should stop talking about it.
Hate speech is a core part of political discourse today. It's no longer out of the mainstream. Expecting Facebook to deal with that is asking too much of a private company. Whom should Facebook muzzle? ISIL? Le Pen? Trump?
Facebook's actions in India are absolutely despicable. The head of policy at Facebook in India is a radicalized member of the Indian rightwing and recently put up a post stating that Muslims are a "degenerate community" and was forced to apologise just a couple of days ago because of pressure on FB from their employees.
She gave a half hearted apology. Facebook should have immediately suspended her or sacked her:
During the recent riots in Delhi where many died, the incitement of violence was by a member of the ruling party but has taken no action against Kapil Mishra's account which is still active:
Whatsapp is also used extensively to share misinformation and hateful content, fueling mob violence and hate, especially targetting the minorities across the country.
So much so, that the current Home Minsiter of India, Amit Shah was seen in public bragging about the power of the IT Cell to
"We can keep making messages go viral, whether they are real or fake, sweet or sour"
https://www.thequint.com/news/politics/amit-shah-real-fake-c...
So, I completely understand the concerns about moderation on Facebook itself.
But what would you actually have anyone do about WhatsApp? It's an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, and the whole purpose of end-to-end encryption (which, last I checked, HN was generally in favour of) is that there is no way to surveil or moderate the content of someone's communications.
The intent behind talking about WhatsApp wasn't in terms of moderation, but just WhatsApp-a Facebook product, used as a tool used to spread hate/misinformation for political gains.
edit: and how Whatsapp in general has fractured the information-media ecosystem, sending shock-waves across the democracy.
>It's an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, and the whole purpose of end-to-end encryption (which, last I checked, HN was generally in favour of) is that there is no way to surveil or moderate the content of someone's communications.
AFAIK group chats aren't e2e, and that's where most of the misinformation is shared.
Imagine a White person, who is the head of the organization in a country sharing a post that African Americans are a "degenerate community". In any western country, the person would not only be promptly sacked, but would also become untouchable in mainstream organizations.
The Indian politics and judiciary have been compromised by right wing Hindu nationalists and it is impossible to expect anything from them. However, I expected better from Facebook. In a western country Facebook wouldn't think twice about firing any employee who shared such a post.
America is not in a cold war nuclear standoff with an large African nation with whom it shares a border, whereupon millions of it's own citizens may believe that by virtue of their culture then land they live upon should be in said 'African nation' instead of America.
Point being, even though it's terrible ... it's really, really different.
I don’t think people have realized that Zuckerberg’s intent is to be the Rupert Murdoch of the 21st century. He’s no ally of liberal society or democracy.
Investors don't mind, users don't seem to care. Can we pinpoint why it is 'bad'? People are making money, signs that the product brings 'value' to society. I am young, how much of the world has Murdoch influenced? Has it all been bad? Sounds like a player that made it. Do we change the game in this case?
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Removing posts by elected officials is running really close to foreign interference in domestic affairs. Given the history of the East India Company, I am sure India is especially sensitive to foreign companies trying to influence or curtail the speech of their elected officials.
> Removing posts by elected officials is running really close to foreign interference in domestic affairs.
No, it's not. If anything, it's opting out of interfering in domestic affairs.
Facebook is not an official channel. The elected official has many other platforms, including the country's media, that will publish their message. They can create a blog if they want.
If Facebook is the only viable channel for reaching a large part of the electorate, the core issue is having only that one channel. You solve it by forcing competition, not by stifling Facebook's right to decide what they want to allow on their platform.
I deeply loathe Facebook and think they're undermining democracy in every country, but there should never be a way for a government to force a publisher to distribute an ideology that the publisher disagrees with.
The comment I was responding to seemed to be proposing it.
I don't know about India, but in the US, there's been a major debate about whether govt can force platforms to retain posts and several attempted lawsuits over it.
source: https://internetfreedom.in/joint-letter-to-twitter-about-rem...