The Guardian: Facebook delayed publishing a report revealing its impact on the rights of Indian Muslims | liberties

The British newspaper, The Guardian, said that former Facebook employee Frances Hogan and two prominent leakers with her; They renewed their call on Facebook to release its long-awaited report on its influence in India, claiming the company is deliberately covering up human rights concerns, after leaks revealed that users in India were being inundated with fake news and anti-Muslim posts.

On Wednesday, more than 20 organizations joined the whistleblowers, Francis Hogan and Sophie Zhang, as well as Brian Boland, former Facebook vice president, to demand that the company, which became called “Meta”, publish the results of the independent review that it She was commissioned by the law firm Foley Hogg in 2020, to study its impact in India, the company’s largest market with 340 million users.

Speaking at a Facebook critics’ press briefing known as Facebook’s Real Oversight Board, Zafarul Islam Khan, the former head of the Minority Committee of Delhi, said that “as a result of the continued dissemination of a barrage of hate on social media, particularly on Facebook, Indian Muslims have been stripped of their They are almost inhumane and helpless and voiceless.”

The newspaper pointed out that the issuance of the review was repeatedly delayed, so that rights groups told the Wall Street Journal – last November – that the social media company had narrowed the scope of the draft report and postponed its issuance.

Calls for more information on the impact of hate speech on Meta platforms increased in India when, in 2021, Hogan leaked internal documents outlining how the company struggled to monitor problematic content in countries with large user bases.

Hogan’s leaked papers reveal how users in India are inundated with fake news and hate speech, including anti-Muslim and election-interfering posts, as well as continuing criticism that the company is not allocating adequate resources to its major non-English markets.

disproportionate budget

In her papers and testimony before Congress, Hogan revealed that Facebook allocated only 13% of its budget for disinformation to non-US countries, even though Americans constitute only 10% of the platform’s active daily user base.

These funding issues are particularly stark in countries like India, which has 22 official languages, and “Facebook allows uncensored inflammatory content that has become a tool to target minorities, Dalits and women in India,” said Testa Sittalvad, an Indian activist and civil rights journalist.

Miranda Seasons, director of human rights policy at Facebook, said in a statement, “Given the complexity of this work, we want these assessments to be comprehensive. We will report annually on how we address human rights impacts, in line with our Human Rights Policy.”

“Facebook knows that its operations are happening behind the veil. We must push for mandatory transparency,” Hogan concluded. “Unless Facebook is asked to publish, India will not get the security it deserves,” she added.