3 staff memos flagged ‘polarising’ content, hate speech in India but Facebook said not a problem

Wednesday, 10 November 2021Newsdesk

FROM a “constant barrage of polarising nationalistic content”, to “fake or inauthentic” messaging, from “misinformation” to content “denigrating” minority communities, several red flags concerning its operations in India were raised internally in Facebook between 2018 and 2020.

New Delhi, 10 November 2021

As per news report of The Indian Express, However, despite these explicit alerts by staff mandated to undertake oversight functions, an internal review meeting in 2019 with Chris Cox, then Vice President, Facebook, found “comparatively low prevalence of problem content (hate speech, etc)” on the platform. Two reports flagging hate speech and “problem content” were presented in January-February 2019, months before the Lok Sabha elections. A third report, as late as August 2020, admitted that the platform’s AI (artificial intelligence) tools were unable to “identify vernacular languages” and had, therefore, failed to identify hate speech or problematic content.

Source - The Indian Express