Days after a rioting Muslim mob took to streets in Bengaluru and burnt down a Dalit Congress MLA’s house and attacked police station over an allegedly blasphemous Facebook post on Prophet Muhammad, ‘liberals’ in India are deleting their Facebook accounts.
Ex-NDTV employee Nidhi was amongst the first to ‘delete’ her Facebook account. She continued to have Facebook’s other offering WhatsApp as she claimed it helps her stay connected to her family.Deleted Facebook
— Nidhi Razdan (@Nidhi) August 15, 2020
Abusive troll masquerading as a journalist Swati Chaturvedi also declared that she had deleted her account years ago.I left @Facebook & deleted my account years ago.
— Swati Chaturvedi (@bainjal) August 15, 2020
Year plus ago Facebook team was in Delhi to set up independent national committees to monitor content as per strict norms. Amongst others they met me. I suggested they avoid persons connected to political parties, big business or government. Seems they failed, going by @WSJ.
— K. C. Singh (@ambkcsingh) August 15, 2020
Except, the reason the ‘liberals’ want to delete their Facebook account is not because rioting Islamist mob burnt Bengaluru over a Facebook post. But because one Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report has cited anonymous ‘top executive’ in Facebook making claims that the social networking platform does not consider ‘anti-Muslim’ posts as ‘hate speech’. They’re upset that one of the top executives in Facebook, Ankhi Das, allegedly supports the BJP and PM Modi. And hence, by default, as per the ‘liberals’ if she does not consider certain posts as ‘hate speech’ it is a huge scandal. For them, Das’ neutrality is questioned just because she may be a Modi supporter. And all this is based on nameless ‘ex and current’ Facebook employees.
On the other hand, rioting Muslim mob taking a city to hostage, burning down a Dalit MLA’s house, setting vehicles ablaze and unleashing terror on citizens is a convenient way to ‘blame’ P Naveen, the Congress MLA’s nephew who wrote the alleged post.
The bone of contention is post by BJP MLA in Telangana, T. Raja Singh over his alleged posts on Rohingyas and Muslims. WSJ, citing unnamed ‘executives’ claims that Facebook had concluded Singh was a ‘dangerous’ individual. However, Das allegedly opposed applying hate speech rules to Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist people as it would ‘damage’ Facebook’s business prospects in India.
WSJ further cites Andy Stone, Communication executive at Facebook, who claims that Das’ apprehensions were not the only reason to not ban Singh from Facebook. WSJ report further claims how the platform gave ‘favourable’ treatment to BJP by removing fake news pages created by Pakistan and Congress ahead of 2019 general elections. Essentially, the fact that a platform proactively removed fake news is a bad thing only because it ‘helped’ the BJP.
None of the ‘liberals’ deleted their Facebook accounts when the platform shielded Muslim rapists who had raped a minor Dalit girl in September last year by removing the news articles shared on the platform. Recently, Facebook India has appointed an abusive troll as policy head who had worked earlier for Prashan Kishor. In fact, in the recent Bengaluru violence, the ‘liberal’ media in India chose to blame the victim, single him out, profile him and throw him under the bus to a blood-thirsty online mob on Facebook itself which is baying for his blood. There were Facebook posts which threatened him with ‘Kamlesh Tiwari-like fate’ for his ‘blasphemous post’. Facebook did not consider that as ‘hate speech’ as well.
Death threat to Dalit leader’s nephew and riots by Muslim mob does not make ‘liberals’ as much angry as anonymous ‘Facebook executives’ giving bytes to publications casting aspersions that the platform ‘favours’ BJP when there are tonnes of examples how Facebook censorship is predominantly anti-BJP.
The whole ‘hate speech’ is more like a smokescreen. What they ultimately aim for is the same level of censorship and control that they enjoyed over the mainstream media. The internet and emergence of social media especially has rocked their smooth sailing boat as people actually started holding them accountable for their biased and misleading reportage.
US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi winning elections despite their editorials being passed off as reports have rubbed salt on their wounds caused by this rocking of boat. Now they just need excuses to get same level of control. Former Amnesty India head Aakar Patel calling for violence against Brahmin is okay, that is intellectual. But replace anything that says “Brahmin” with “Muslim” and it becomes hate speech for them. Clearly, there are no principles at play here.
