Facebook Inc has banned Bharatiya Janata Party’s Telangana unit MLA T Raja Singh for violating its hate speech policies amid growing contr...
Facebook Inc has banned Bharatiya Janata Party’s Telangana unit MLA T Raja Singh for violating its hate speech policies amid growing controversy in India over how the social media company regulates its political content, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The crisis began after the WSJ first reported on August 14 that Facebook’s India policy head Ankhi Das had opposed the idea of removing incendiary posts by Singh, who labelled Muslims as traitors and wrote that Rohingya refugees in India should be shot. Other BJP leaders posts were deleted from the platform after the newspaper approached them for a response to the article.
“We have banned Raja Singh from Facebook for violating our policy prohibiting those that promote or engage in violence and hate from having a presence on our platform,” a spokesperson told the United States-based newspaper. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to this decision.”
At least five profiles of Singh, which had more than 3 lakh followers, showed the message that “this content is not available right now”.
Last month, Singh had claimed that his official Facebook account was “hacked and blocked” in 2018. The BJP MLA further said he only has an official YouTube and Twitter account, adding that he had never made...
