FB, Twitter stir up hornet’s nest in India in 2020

By Nishant Arora New Delhi, Dec 26 : As we gloat over reports how the US and European countries have started to tame the social media platforms in regard to anti-trust market practices, users privacy and the spread of fake news, Big Tech firms had their own iota of controversies in India in 2020, generating enough political heat in the process.
The biggest controversy came in August when the Wall Street Journal reported on the blatant biases of Facebook India’s team, headed by their public policy chief for the country, Ankhi Das.
The report alleged that the top leadership at Facebook’s India office refused to apply the company’s own rules to politicians from the ruling party, despite clear violations of Facebook’s policies against incitement to violence, hate speech and misinformation.
Following the report, the Congress raised the issue of what it calls “unholy nexus” of the ruling BJP with Facebook and WhatsApp.
Shashi Tharoor, the head of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT), called on Facebook to respond to allegations of ignoring hate speech in favour of the ruling party.
Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad also wrote a hard-hitting letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, blaming the Facebook India management of alleged bias against people supporting the right-of-centre ideology.