New Delhi, India:
BJP is said to have flagged 44 Facebook India pages to the fore of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, claiming that they conveyed posts and messages which were “not in line with facts” and “in violation of expected standards”. And as per the reports these pages have been taken down from the platform. The report was given by Indian Express on 30 August 2020. These pages include the official account of the Bhim Army ‘We Hate BJP’, some unofficial Congress-supporting pages, and a page named ‘The Truth of Gujarat’ sharing mostly Alt News fact checks.
It is being reported that besides these, Facebook pages which supported journalists Ravish Kumar and Vinod Dua were also removed. Before the 2019 general elections Facebook asserted to have dumped 687 pages and accounts which had connections with individuals associated with the Congress party’s IT cell. They took this step in a process to eliminate fake accounts.
Not only this BJP also allegedly asked Facebook India to restore 17 deleted pages and to legalise two right wing preferring websites ‘The Chaupal’ and ‘OpIndia’ and permitting these pages to sustain the advertising revenue for their content. None of the 17 pages that were restored on BJP’s request are directly connected to any political party but at present they share content from Postcard News.
Vikas Pandey who is the founder of ‘The Chaupal’ told that although Facebook has reversed its monetisation the site hasn’t been granted the monetisation benefits. Ankhi Das Facebook’s Public policy Head Ankhi Das supporting BJP opposed the ban imposed on a BJP politician from Facebook for reportedly sharing Islamophobic posts.
Postcard News founder Mahesh Vikram Hegde in January 2020 blamed the Muslim community for planting a bomb in Mangalore International Airport, which was later found to be a false allegation. Back then in 2018, Hegde was also reportedly arrested on charges of promoting communal enmity and outraging religious sentiments by posting “fake news”.
Earlier Congress’s General Secretary KC Venugopal twice wrote a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg which published in an article in Times Magazine. In the letter Venugopal questioned the steps being taken on repeated allegations about the Facebook’s India unit being biased towards the ruling BJP. The Opposition party claimed the leak of letter in the magazine “revealed” more information and “evidence of biases and a quid pro quo relationship” of Facebook India with the BJP.