Facebook pages associated with RSS promote fear mongering, anti-Muslim narratives: FB whistleblower

Hyderabad: Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist and company’s whistleblower, recently told the US Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the global social media giant “promotes global division and ethnic violence”, including in India.

According to the complaint filed before the US securities regulator, pages associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) promoted “fear mongering, anti-Muslim narratives” and a lack of Indian language editors led to unchecked hate speech on the platform.

It also revealed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) uses Single User Multiple Accounts for propaganda that affects neighbouring Bangladesh as well.

The complaint that Facebook’s language capabilities are “inadequate” and lead to “global misinformation and ethnic violence” is one of the many flagged by Haugen, with SEC against Facebook’s practices.

A leaked internal FB document, “Adversarial Harmful Networks – India Case Study”, is cited in one of the SEC complaints uploaded on CBS News’ website.

An excerpt says: “RSS (Indian nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) Users, Groups, and Pages promote fear mongering, anti-Muslim narratives targeted pro-Hindu populations with V&I (violent and incendiary) intent…. There were a number of dehumanizing posts comparing Muslims to ‘pigs’ and ‘dogs’ and misinformation (claiming that men have been urged to rape their female family members).

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