Vinod Dua, Ravish Kumar Fan Pages On Facebook Taken Down Before 2019 Polls, Says Report

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party, in the run-up to the 2019 Loksabha elections, flagged to Facebook India a list of 44 pages opposed to the party, claiming they were “in violation of expected standards” and carried posts “not in line with facts”, the Indian Express reported.

The report also said that as of Monday, 14 of these pages were no longer on the platform.

An official account of the Bhim Army, satire site “We Hate BJP”, unofficial Congress-supporting pages, and a page called “The Truth of Gujarat” sharing mostly Alt News fact checks are some of the pages flagged by the BJP that are on the platform.

The pages of the site in support of journalists Ravish Kumar and Vinod Dua were also taken down according to the report.

The BJP, in November last year, asked Facebook India to re-instate 17 deleted pages and “monetise” two right-leaning news websites — The Chaupal and OpIndia. Through monetising, pages receive ad revenue for their content.

The 17 pages are all back on the social media site. BJP IT Cell head Amit Malviya, according to the report, was told by Facebook that the pages were taken down “erroneously”.

His site has not been allowed monetization after Facebook revoked its monetization in March 2019, the founder of “The Chaupal” Vikas Pandey told the Indian Express.

According to the report, all these 17 pages, restored on the request of the BJP, share content almost exclusively from Postcard News, many in Kannada. These pages do not mention any political affiliation.

As the report states, these requests came through emails between Malviya and Facebook India Public Policy executives Ankhi Das and Shivnath Thukral.

Malviya, in emails from February 2019, referred to a meeting where Facebook India and he had discussed “shielding” certain BJP-leaning Facebook pages. Responding to the Indian Express, Malviya said Thukral had suggested this idea in a January 2019 meeting to address pages that the BJP thinks have been “wrongly targeted”.

A Facebook spokesperson said, “There is no term as shielding. We have a process called Cross-Check which is a system for reducing errors in enforcement by ensuring content from some Pages and profiles is given a second layer of review to make sure we’ve applied our policies correctly. It does not prevent enforcement action if a violation of our Community Standards is found,” reported the Indian Express.

Malviya, in his response, told the Indian Express: “There were pages like I Support Narendra Modi and other large pages run by genuine volunteers who were fearful they might get struck down. We have in the past spoken to Facebook and asked them to do the right thing. They barely even respond to us. We were seeking a more transparent and fair system. Clearly, they have thought otherwise.”

On the question of whether the public policy has input on content decisions, the Facebook spokesperson told the India Express that public policy has input only if the designated content policy team decides to pull in other teams.

“Public Policy team, also comprising politics and government outreach members, were the first point of contact for all political parties during the 2019 elections. During campaigning, several parties escalated issues being faced by their official and support pages. Our internal process requires these escalations to be flagged to various specialist teams who decide and enforce these escalations. Global election teams help drive decisions along with content policy teams that oversee enforcement on the basis of the community standards, as well as the operations team which oversees enforcement. Just like other stakeholders such as civil society, media, or government institutions, all political parties can flag the issues they are facing with us,” the spokesperson said, according to the report.