Inflammatory content on FB was up 300% before Delhi riots, says internal report
Internal Facebook documents have shown that rumours and calls to violence had spread on WhatsApp in late February 2020 during the Delhi riots, the Wall Street Journal reported. In its largest market, Facebook’s documents had shown that inflammatory content was up 300% above previous levels in the months after December 2019 the report said, which was the time there were protests regarding the Citizenship Amendment Act. As per the report, titled ‘Communal Conflict in India’ it said that researchers found that inflammatory content was primarily targeted at Muslims.
The researchers reportedly found that Hindu and Muslim users in India told the company that they are subject to a “large amount of content that encourages conflict, hatred and violence on Facebook and WhatsApp”…. They also found that there was content that can incite violence, including posts that compared Muslims to pigs or dogs, and claiming that the “Quran calls for men to rape their female family members”. This content was from two groups with ties to India’s ruling political party, the BJP.
The Wall Street Journal also referred to another report called ‘Adversarial Harmful Networks: India Case Study’ which reportedly found that content posted by those individuals, groups or pages related to the RSS are “never flagged” because Facebook does not have the systems to detect content in Hindi and Bengali. The report added that these users were posting content about ‘Love Jihad’ as well. Facebook researchers wrote that there were groups and pages replete with inflammatory and misleading anti-Muslim content on Facebook….
