Facebook enforces its policies in a very non-partisan, objective manner, the chief of the company’s India operations told NDTV on Friday, rejecting reports that had said a business leader had vetoed action against a pacesetter of the ruling BJP accountable for hate speech given its business considerations.
“When it involves limiting hate speech or speech calling for violence, we are pretty clear and that we are transparent in articulating our community guidelines on what’s allowed on our platforms and what’s not,” Ajit Mohan, Facebook vice chairman and India manager, told NDTV in an interview.
“No one individual within the company has the ability to essentially say ‘you mustn’t do enforcement of our policy’. i believe that was what was flawed about the characterisation of internal conversations was that the method is for multiple voices to stick in and to offer more context about the items that are happening,” he said.
Mr Mohan was speaking about the controversy surrounding its former Public Policy Director Ankhi Das who quit last year, two months after a Wall Street Journal report said she had a job within the social network giving a free pass to a BJP leader accused of giving a hate speech. The leader was banned by Facebook some weeks after the report came and led to a backlash within and out of doors the corporate.
Mr Mohan, however, maintained that the report didn’t influence Facebook’s decision, saying “In a world where conversations that are current get exposed, it is simple to assume that something happened due to internal conversations being leaked. But I afflict [the suggestion that doing what’s right isn’t Facebook’s best interests].”
“I don’t think anyone wants hate speech on our platforms. i do not think it’s in our interests for users to be exposed to hate speech… Our financial incentive is incredibly biased in favour of doing the proper thing on our platform,” he said.
Mr Mohan also detailed the company’s stand on India’s new IT Rules that have prompted a legal challenge by WhatsApp – a corporation owned by Facebook although the social networking giant has largely welcomed the foundations.
“Across our family of apps, we’ve made it clear that we respect Indian law. and that we signalled that when the principles came, we were visiting attempt to comply. apart from the one area around traceability on WhatsApp and even there what we’ve got done is use the legal framework in India to ask the courts the question in terms of what’s the implication of traceability and that we clearly have a disagreement there,” he said.
“But even after we were disagreeing with one particular element, you may see that WhatsApp itself has complied with many other elements of the new rules that were introduced. We do believe that there’s a selected question on encryption and privacy that needs clarification from the courts,” Mr Mohan said.
“We made it clear we were aligned with the concept agenda of enhancing user safety, we respect Indian law. the web will like greater clarity by the new rules,” he added.
