Facebook Officials Played Down Hate In India, Reveals Internal Report
NDTV
A document from July 2020, titled "Communal Conflict in India" showed how offline harm was often accompanied by online hate, during key moments of crisis.Internal documents also reflect the human impact of this spike in hate, captured in interviews of Muslims and Hindus.
Content espousing hate surged in India around key events from elections to Covid and protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, show Facebook's internal documents reviewed by NDTV. The documents reveal how despite the spike in inflammatory and anti-minority content India, Facebook's senior officials downplayed the threats it posed just a year earlier, raising the question of whether they did enough to combat it.
A document from July 2020, titled "Communal Conflict in India", for instance, showed how offline harm was often accompanied by online hate, during key moments of crisis.
The report said one of the reasons that motivated it was the "recent spike in inflammatory content and hate speech in India" and "marked rise in violence against Muslim Minority in India over the last 18 months".
It found that in December 2019 -- which saw over 80 per cent increase in inflammatory content over the baseline around the time of the anti-CAA protests -- online content on Facebook and WhatsApp included "misinformation on protests, demonizing content (against Muslims) hate speech and inflammatory spikes".