21 ms·

Facebook removed fake accounts in India until it saw BJP politician was involved

230 points by chalst 6y ago

soco 6y ago
I rather expected Facebook doing almost nothing, so for me this news is news. I had my experiences reporting blatantly fake accounts or nazi insignia-ridden ones, only to receive the canned answer "it doesn't infringe in our community standards" so my expectations were low to start with...
qart 6y ago
I'm not on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. All Indian politicians are given special treatment on Twitter. When I flag comments by ordinary users, they get taken down pretty soon. I flagged a few videos of a politician inciting a beheading, but both he, and his videos are on Twitter. In that respect, Twitter (and Facebook) are no different from Indian law enforcement agencies. One set of rules for nobodies like me, a different set of rules for the "rulers". Ironic, because they are not supposed to be our rulers, but our servants.
- Griffinsauce 6y ago
  They made this pretty explicit for the former president of the US: anybody "newsworthy" (ie. has enough power to hurt the platform) has near free play around the rules. In contrast my personal opinion is that we should hold people in power to a higher standard.
  - qwytw 6y ago
    I don't think content posted by elected officials should be moderated (except maybe in the most extreme cases). The society should have the right too see it and make their own conclusions about it. I bet a quite a few people would have had a better opinion of Trump, if Twitter actually removed his tweets where he made various untruthful and inciteful claims.
    - akudha 6y ago
      quite a few people would have had a better opinion of Trump, if Twitter actually removed his tweets where he made various untruthful This is a double edged sword. A lot of people will (and do) blindly believe anything their leader (Trump or someone else) says, no matter how stupid/wrong/evil it is. I guess you are assuming people are rational and that people have time/patience to carefully analyze the content they are consuming and separate truth from hysteria. The reality is that most people (left or right, religious or non-religious... doesn't matter) have already made up their minds and simply look for people who think alike, to rationalize the bubble they are in. Which the tech companies and media are happy to serve, as that is where the money is.
  - buran77 6y ago
    It goes beyond newsworthy accounts and into what's in the best interest of the company. When I posted this [0] a couple of months ago if sounded far fetched for many. Facebook (and Twitter) will selectively apply any measure depending on whether it's in their best interest or not. Everything else is usually a rationalization of that outcome. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26195047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26195047 > They are removing some fake accounts and not others. > Some departments are routinely instructed to turn a blind eye to the actions of some but not others
  - icegreentea2 6y ago
    In the US, political speech (of all types) is usually held to a looser standard (in the sense that it's harder to restrict) - which I think makes sense. We should hold our elected officials to a higher standard, but we probably do so through the mechanisms built into our laws. That being said... not all speech by political figures is political speech.
  - snarf21 6y ago
    I agree but they are never going to hold those with the ability to cut off the money to a higher standard. Money talks.
- thoweruo2434 6y ago
  Context: https://twitter.com/DrJK_Murali/status/1381567386587852800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/DrJK_Murali/status/1381567386587852800?r... https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/aap-mla-amanatullah-khan-calls-for-beheading-of-yati-narsinghanand-saraswati-as-punishment-for-criticising-prophet-muhammad/ https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/aap-mla-amanatullah-khan-cal... I'd like to say this is related to "one" wing or the other, but it's not. International liberal media like the Guardian have consistently biased reporting where they report hate speech from the Indian pagans, while completely muting out similar messages from adherents of Islam and Christianity. Worse still the former tend to be simple rabble-rousing, while the latter often have had real consequences. See for instance, https://www.opindia.com/2019/10/kamlesh-tiwari-murder-post-mortem-report/ https://www.opindia.com/2019/10/kamlesh-tiwari-murder-post-m... In fact, barring a few indoctrinated people most folk I know are very aware of these biases - many such stories often find uniform coverage in "vernacular" media", and is in fact one of the reasons why, ironically, BJP gets votes. English speakers of the world, of course, are both pretentious of their own half-baked knowledge, and at the same time, and dangerously, have both the resources and a desperate, almost religious, need to affect change. No wonder they've destroyed much of the Middle East. Please don't bother India - you lot have done enough damage already.
  - commoner 6y ago
    > OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news portal founded in 2014 by Rahul Raj and Kumar Kamal. The website has published fake news and anti-Muslim commentary on multiple occasions, including a 2020 incident in which it falsely claimed that a Hindu boy was sacrificed in a Bihar mosque. > OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers "liberal media", and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindutva ideology. According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems opposed to the BJP, and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP. In 2019, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) rejected OpIndia's application to be certified as a fact checker. IFCN-certified fact checkers identified 25 fake news stories and 14 misreported stories published by OpIndia from January 2018 to June 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpIndia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpIndia
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
chalst 6y ago
I posted the original Guardian story yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825990 but perhaps because of my lousy copyediting of the title it only attracted five upvotes. This follow-up story seems pretty good and the title was not difficult to squeeze under 80 chars. The story of Facebook treating India's ruling BJP has attracted a fair bit of coverage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=facebook%20bjp&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... - but the story suggests FB values good connections with the quasi-fascist ruling party over the risk of yet more damage to its reputation.
- saltedonion 6y ago
  I feel like Facebook has realized that if they win in a major market and becomes a monopoly, reputation no longer matters as they are dominant anyway. This is perhaps the logic behind nonintervention.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > but the story suggests FB values good connections with the quasi-fascist ruling party over the risk of yet more damage to its reputation. Do people need a better example? He literally orders Facebook employees to read communist propaganda. https://amp.smh.com.au/technology/mark-zuckerberg-snapped-with-chinese-president-xi-jinpings-book-20141209-1233er.html https://amp.smh.com.au/technology/mark-zuckerberg-snapped-wi...
  - reducesuffering 6y ago
    > “literally orders” From the article: ‘"I bought this book [Governance of China, by Xi] for my colleagues as well," Mr Zuckerberg was quoted as telling Mr Lu.’
    - meragrin_ 6y ago
      "I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics." "I want" to an employee of Facebook from Zuckerberg might as well be an order. Whether that was said to the colleagues is another matter. Zuckerberg may well have been just sucking up to the Chinese.
merricksb 6y ago
Earlier discussions of original articles about political manipulation on Facebook in The Guardian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26777374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26777374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804791
amriksohata 6y ago
When you actually read the article some were voting for AAP and also happened to Congress too. So another politically partisan headline.
- sa1 6y ago
  But those accounts were removed, if I understand correctly?
baybal2 6y ago
With this finally being mentioned, it also needs to be said that they are quite enthusiastic about mowing down Congress on FB, and IG. And that very much unlike other far more on the fringe parties. This was going on for far longer before Facebook's political engagement became known in the West. It feels to me, Zuckerberg wants INC dead, and buried. Wouldn't be against that myself. INC, is for all reasons, synonymic with corruption. But this will leave BJP with no counter whatsoever besides regional parties.
- majjgepolja 6y ago
  I dislike BJP propaganda as much as next educated person, but could it be just that if facebook stops sensoring BJP bots, they might provoke mobs to physically attack Facebook in India, and their employee's safety is important for them?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > provoke mobs to physically attack Facebook in India, and their employee's safety is important for them? This doesn't support the notion that they blocked even more fringe, and radical parties than BJP
    - majjgepolja 6y ago
      Other parties may be radical, but BJP has orders of magnitude more people and positions of power.
  - ameen 6y ago
    Facebook has hired BJP aligned individuals to run top country posts for a while now. https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-facebook-india-resigned-quit-bjp-hindu-muslim-conflict https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-faceb...
- legolas2412 6y ago
  Can you show instances where congress (INC) was censored?
zpeti 6y ago
It seems to me on this topic almost everyone (including myself) is in a completely hypocritical position. We want facebook to take action in countries where we disagree, but not take action in areas/countries where we agree. Here is a perfect example. I imagine most people criticising Facebook here were in favour of facebook wiping the hunter biden story from everywhere. Because one is a conservative government, the other is a risk to electing a left wing one. The other situation china. Most people find it outrageous that Google tried to get into china by building a censoring search engine. Yet expect Google and Facebook to filter disinformation elsewhere that is a threat to their side, or even just articles sceptical of lockdown. Unfortunately in both cases we can't have both. These are directly conflicting situations, you can have one, but you can't have both.
- esyir 6y ago
  Agreed, this isn't any principled approach. This is "I want Facebook to enforce my own personal value set", even if it goes against local value sets.
- ajkjk 6y ago
  I don't buy the "argument from hypocrisy" at all. The situations are not symmetric because there is a right answer on each side and they give different results. Google should filter information when it's the right thing to do. It should not filter information when it's the wrong thing to do. The superficial symmetry of the two situations is completely irrelevant to which course of action is right and acceptable.
  - zapdrive 6y ago
    And who decides what's wrong and what's right? You? Or, Google?
    - zpeti 6y ago
      Or the government? Which might be run by Donald trump, or Joe Biden.
    - 6y ago
r_singh 6y ago
The Indian leading party has over 3.2 million WhatsApp accounts. These groups are used during Election Day in many states to spread misinformation amongst gullible citizens and change the outcome on the last moment....
- setum 6y ago
  source, if any?
  - r_singh 6y ago
    Watch this from 27:59 https://youtu.be/1OW7AQxpf2g https://youtu.be/1OW7AQxpf2g (Edit: it’s in Hindi)
    - pritambarhate 6y ago
      I am from India and know Hindi. The person in Video is Mr. Amit Shah. President of BJP and Home Minister of India. At the above timestamp he says (translation): Even if it is sour or sweet, truth or false we could spread it to people because we had created a group of 32 Lac (3.2 Million) people on Whatsapp.
      - r_singh 6y ago
        Apologies, revising previous comment because I misunderstood the said text. He indeed said that they created a WhatsApp account with 32 lakh people in it... Hence the translation above is correct.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        throwaway_s1234 6y ago
        > He said that we have created 32 lakh WhatsApp groups (not people). Don't lie man. Not cool at all! He said "Woh isliye hopaya ki hum battis lakh WhatsApp ka EK group banakar khade the". Which translates to "it happened because we created a WhatsApp group with 32 lakh people in it". You accuse a political party of spreading misinformation and you do that yourself! Did you seriously think you are the only one who knows Hindi in Hacker News and that you can get away with this lie? There is no need to even "listen carefully". It is as audible as it gets. 32 lakh WhatsApp groups is technically crazy to pull off unless done programmatically. And what is the point of 32 lakh WhatsApp groups? It serves no purpose to have so many groups.
acd10j 6y ago
I think they know that if they will not tow Ruling party (BJP) line they will lose another billion user market just like China. It is unfortunate that Modi Government is employing fascist/communist techniques of slowly killing democracy and dissent.
AndyMcConachie 6y ago
"Whistleblower points to double standard in Facebook’s enforcement of rules against powerful." Ya think? All of these articles about FB needing to block this or that are really missing the point. It's really quite simple. FB doesn't want to be regulated. The people who might regulate FB like Modi and the BJP. Therefore FB treats Modi and the BJP better. There is no universal standard we can apply to content regulation. We like to pretend that FB can somehow implement fairness. They couldn't even if they wanted to. There is no bright line between political advertising and non-political advertising. This entire discourse is facile. There is no universal set of rules we can apply to FB. FB is always going to act in deference to those who can regulate it and their friends.
- chalst 6y ago
  On the facts you're dead right but I reject the cynical framing. This is an important story because we want the truth to come out. It's why, for instance, the first impeachment of Trump was so important, even though you could correctly say there was no chance of success in the Senate. Because of this, safeguarding the integrity of the election becam important to a lot of people, and so Trump was unable to steal the election even with complete dominance over his party and a large, devotedly loyal mass movement behind him.
gigatexal 6y ago
Ugh. The BJP are Hindu nationalists that should be labeled as extremists — a bunch of Napoleon-complex-having-authoritarians... But India is the next big thing so all companies from Apple to Facebook and everyone in between will likely pander to the government. I’m East Indian but born in America (lucky me I guess) living in Berlin. I mean no disrespect to my fellow Indians just to convey my utter contempt for Modi and his thugs both the BJP and his gestapo the RSS.
- anxiety554 6y ago
  > The BJP are Hindu nationalists that should be labeled as extremists The core root of all the evil in India is the Vedas and its preaching on varna system(modern caste system). BJP is just another by product. Without educating the people on these text books its very hard to find a solution.
- revendell_elf 6y ago
  They should be labelled as extremists just like many other Islamic organizations in India who have been giving threats to make India an Islamic nation by killing all the Kafirs, right?
  - reactspa 6y ago
    Every single political party in Pakistan is an islamic-nationalist party. Yet the Western media never describes them so. Yet the BJP is always suffixed with "hindu-nationalist". Israel has preferential citizenship for Jews. Yet, somehow India is not allowed to have CAA (per western media). Double standards, I suppose.
    - naturalauction 6y ago
      India is a supposedly secular country, it's stated in the constitution. Pakistan and Israel explicitly aren't. Also, you are totally wrong about "every single political party in Pakistan being an Islamic-nationalist party." The second biggest party in the Parliament is the Pakistan People's Party, who are secular. Additionally, Israel gets plenty of criticism in international media for its preferential citizenship laws regarding Jews.
known 6y ago
Facebook promoted a con-man / sociopath as savior of India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Narendra_Modi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Narendra_Modi
screye 6y ago
Does Facebook have lower standards towards politicians or BJP politicians ? I've seen Facebook and esp. Twitter take an active stance on censorship that goes far beyond banning spam. While this is a cut&dry case, the HN discussion is clearly centered around 'special treatment of those in power' at large. As I see it, fake news is a good 50-50 mix of actual fake news and a political perspective that is inconvenient to your agenda. This is especially true in India, where politics has always been the business of gangsters and liars. At this point, I'd be surprised if an Indian political rally by any party was less than 50% fake news. (In the sense that twitter censors it). Throwing unsubstantiated accusations towards your opponent is a grand political tradition that dates back thousands of years. To selectively silence one of them is to consciously pick sides. > “It’s not fair to have one justice system for the rich and important and one for everyone else, but that’s essentially the route that Facebook has carved out,” I'm not sure if I agree. Either a company as a service and it goes full 1st amendment, allowing any content that isn't illegal. Or, treat it as a profit making machine that optimizes for monetary gain. ___________ I personally lie on the 'Monopoly Social Media platforms' should have hard restrictions on what content they are allowed to moderate. Ads about Nigerian princes are banned, but Ponzi schemes and Goop get to keep advertising to billions. While I strongly lean left (socially), I find the reporting on Modi from top tier US news organizations to be just as biased and colored with agenda as many of the articles on the other side (fawning over him) that people are asking to be banned. It is quite hypocritical of left-leaning organizations in the west, to ask for 'objective standards of truth for others', but then turn around and say 'not for us, because we never lie'.
- ameen 6y ago
  Facebook has literally hired BJP aligned individuals: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-facebook-india-resigned-quit-bjp-hindu-muslim-conflict https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-faceb...
  - screye 6y ago
    I don't see anything that indicates that she is aligned towards the BJP outside of one weak accusation that got her fired. As I said before, hate speech is the core of politics in India (sad as it is). If FB actually applied is hate speech rules in India, it would have to close shop the next day. I looked up every post on the 1st page of google, and couldn't find a single 1st source on what she actually did that was fire worthy. There were accusations and supposed hate speech / islamophobia, without any sources given for it. Her education was at JNU, which is India's left-wing ideological center. She works at Facebook, whose employees in the US lean socially left. Her father-in-law is a cabinet minister for one of BJP's biggest political enemies. Without any priors, I'd say she was more likely to help the left than the right. But, ofc, my speculation is just as unsubstantiated as the rest of the reporting surrounding her. ______ Links to the most credible sources or most clear accusations: [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgzGUTcUcAA4FGW?format=jpg&name=orig https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgzGUTcUcAA4FGW?format=jpg&name=... [2] https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-...
fallingfrog 6y ago
This is the new face of government control of the media. Turns out grassroots support can be faked. And of course, as we know from Amazon, corporations do it too.
EastSmith 6y ago
Keeping those fake profiles is campaign contribution.
ChoGGi 6y ago
"It’s not fair" Life isn't fair
robinhood 6y ago
Everything Facebook does nowadays is rotten. I don't see how I would trust this company in the future, unless they drastically change their business model.
ballenf 6y ago
Why do we expect tech companies to stand up to the people in charge of the countries where they operate? Is it because we hope and think that tech companies are somehow a new UN of sorts and we get disappointed when they don't live up to their ideals? I think part of it is that we've all bought into these companies PR departments' promulgation of values and core beliefs. Not realizing that those statements are little more than the ad campaigns that help them sell the most widgets and get the most engagement and hire the most idealistic employees. How many extra hours a week would you work for the company that professes to "share" your values?
thunkshift1 6y ago
While this definitely does not look good on fb, how is this different than, lets say newspapers and main stream media networks tongue-in-cheek supporting politicians of their preference? Why not have some transparency and fact check on that as well. The more I read these articles along the line of ‘social media/big tech bad. Real bad’ the more I see it as a turf war for influence between new and old forms of media, with end users/consumers faring worse in both.

230 points by chalst 6y ago

soco 6y ago

I rather expected Facebook doing almost nothing, so for me this news is news. I had my experiences reporting blatantly fake accounts or nazi insignia-ridden ones, only to receive the canned answer "it doesn't infringe in our community standards" so my expectations were low to start with...

qart 6y ago

I'm not on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. All Indian politicians are given special treatment on Twitter. When I flag comments by ordinary users, they get taken down pretty soon. I flagged a few videos of a politician inciting a beheading, but both he, and his videos are on Twitter. In that respect, Twitter (and Facebook) are no different from Indian law enforcement agencies. One set of rules for nobodies like me, a different set of rules for the "rulers". Ironic, because they are not supposed to be our rulers, but our servants.

Griffinsauce 6y ago
They made this pretty explicit for the former president of the US: anybody "newsworthy" (ie. has enough power to hurt the platform) has near free play around the rules. In contrast my personal opinion is that we should hold people in power to a higher standard.
- qwytw 6y ago
  I don't think content posted by elected officials should be moderated (except maybe in the most extreme cases). The society should have the right too see it and make their own conclusions about it. I bet a quite a few people would have had a better opinion of Trump, if Twitter actually removed his tweets where he made various untruthful and inciteful claims.
  - akudha 6y ago
    quite a few people would have had a better opinion of Trump, if Twitter actually removed his tweets where he made various untruthful This is a double edged sword. A lot of people will (and do) blindly believe anything their leader (Trump or someone else) says, no matter how stupid/wrong/evil it is. I guess you are assuming people are rational and that people have time/patience to carefully analyze the content they are consuming and separate truth from hysteria. The reality is that most people (left or right, religious or non-religious... doesn't matter) have already made up their minds and simply look for people who think alike, to rationalize the bubble they are in. Which the tech companies and media are happy to serve, as that is where the money is.
- buran77 6y ago
  It goes beyond newsworthy accounts and into what's in the best interest of the company. When I posted this [0] a couple of months ago if sounded far fetched for many. Facebook (and Twitter) will selectively apply any measure depending on whether it's in their best interest or not. Everything else is usually a rationalization of that outcome. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26195047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26195047 > They are removing some fake accounts and not others. > Some departments are routinely instructed to turn a blind eye to the actions of some but not others
- icegreentea2 6y ago
  In the US, political speech (of all types) is usually held to a looser standard (in the sense that it's harder to restrict) - which I think makes sense. We should hold our elected officials to a higher standard, but we probably do so through the mechanisms built into our laws. That being said... not all speech by political figures is political speech.
- snarf21 6y ago
  I agree but they are never going to hold those with the ability to cut off the money to a higher standard. Money talks.
thoweruo2434 6y ago
Context: https://twitter.com/DrJK_Murali/status/1381567386587852800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/DrJK_Murali/status/1381567386587852800?r... https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/aap-mla-amanatullah-khan-calls-for-beheading-of-yati-narsinghanand-saraswati-as-punishment-for-criticising-prophet-muhammad/ https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/aap-mla-amanatullah-khan-cal... I'd like to say this is related to "one" wing or the other, but it's not. International liberal media like the Guardian have consistently biased reporting where they report hate speech from the Indian pagans, while completely muting out similar messages from adherents of Islam and Christianity. Worse still the former tend to be simple rabble-rousing, while the latter often have had real consequences. See for instance, https://www.opindia.com/2019/10/kamlesh-tiwari-murder-post-mortem-report/ https://www.opindia.com/2019/10/kamlesh-tiwari-murder-post-m... In fact, barring a few indoctrinated people most folk I know are very aware of these biases - many such stories often find uniform coverage in "vernacular" media", and is in fact one of the reasons why, ironically, BJP gets votes. English speakers of the world, of course, are both pretentious of their own half-baked knowledge, and at the same time, and dangerously, have both the resources and a desperate, almost religious, need to affect change. No wonder they've destroyed much of the Middle East. Please don't bother India - you lot have done enough damage already.
- commoner 6y ago
  > OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news portal founded in 2014 by Rahul Raj and Kumar Kamal. The website has published fake news and anti-Muslim commentary on multiple occasions, including a 2020 incident in which it falsely claimed that a Hindu boy was sacrificed in a Bihar mosque. > OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers "liberal media", and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindutva ideology. According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems opposed to the BJP, and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP. In 2019, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) rejected OpIndia's application to be certified as a fact checker. IFCN-certified fact checkers identified 25 fake news stories and 14 misreported stories published by OpIndia from January 2018 to June 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpIndia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpIndia
- selimthegrim 6y ago

chalst 6y ago

I posted the original Guardian story yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825990 but perhaps because of my lousy copyediting of the title it only attracted five upvotes. This follow-up story seems pretty good and the title was not difficult to squeeze under 80 chars. The story of Facebook treating India's ruling BJP has attracted a fair bit of coverage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=facebook%20bjp&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... - but the story suggests FB values good connections with the quasi-fascist ruling party over the risk of yet more damage to its reputation.

saltedonion 6y ago
I feel like Facebook has realized that if they win in a major market and becomes a monopoly, reputation no longer matters as they are dominant anyway. This is perhaps the logic behind nonintervention.
baybal2 6y ago
> but the story suggests FB values good connections with the quasi-fascist ruling party over the risk of yet more damage to its reputation. Do people need a better example? He literally orders Facebook employees to read communist propaganda. https://amp.smh.com.au/technology/mark-zuckerberg-snapped-with-chinese-president-xi-jinpings-book-20141209-1233er.html https://amp.smh.com.au/technology/mark-zuckerberg-snapped-wi...
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  > “literally orders” From the article: ‘"I bought this book [Governance of China, by Xi] for my colleagues as well," Mr Zuckerberg was quoted as telling Mr Lu.’
  - meragrin_ 6y ago
    "I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics." "I want" to an employee of Facebook from Zuckerberg might as well be an order. Whether that was said to the colleagues is another matter. Zuckerberg may well have been just sucking up to the Chinese.

merricksb 6y ago

Earlier discussions of original articles about political manipulation on Facebook in The Guardian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26777374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26777374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804791

amriksohata 6y ago

When you actually read the article some were voting for AAP and also happened to Congress too. So another politically partisan headline.

sa1 6y ago
But those accounts were removed, if I understand correctly?

baybal2 6y ago

With this finally being mentioned, it also needs to be said that they are quite enthusiastic about mowing down Congress on FB, and IG. And that very much unlike other far more on the fringe parties. This was going on for far longer before Facebook's political engagement became known in the West. It feels to me, Zuckerberg wants INC dead, and buried. Wouldn't be against that myself. INC, is for all reasons, synonymic with corruption. But this will leave BJP with no counter whatsoever besides regional parties.

majjgepolja 6y ago
I dislike BJP propaganda as much as next educated person, but could it be just that if facebook stops sensoring BJP bots, they might provoke mobs to physically attack Facebook in India, and their employee's safety is important for them?
- baybal2 6y ago
  > provoke mobs to physically attack Facebook in India, and their employee's safety is important for them? This doesn't support the notion that they blocked even more fringe, and radical parties than BJP
  - majjgepolja 6y ago
    Other parties may be radical, but BJP has orders of magnitude more people and positions of power.
- ameen 6y ago
  Facebook has hired BJP aligned individuals to run top country posts for a while now. https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-facebook-india-resigned-quit-bjp-hindu-muslim-conflict https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-faceb...
legolas2412 6y ago
Can you show instances where congress (INC) was censored?

zpeti 6y ago

It seems to me on this topic almost everyone (including myself) is in a completely hypocritical position. We want facebook to take action in countries where we disagree, but not take action in areas/countries where we agree. Here is a perfect example. I imagine most people criticising Facebook here were in favour of facebook wiping the hunter biden story from everywhere. Because one is a conservative government, the other is a risk to electing a left wing one. The other situation china. Most people find it outrageous that Google tried to get into china by building a censoring search engine. Yet expect Google and Facebook to filter disinformation elsewhere that is a threat to their side, or even just articles sceptical of lockdown. Unfortunately in both cases we can't have both. These are directly conflicting situations, you can have one, but you can't have both.

esyir 6y ago
Agreed, this isn't any principled approach. This is "I want Facebook to enforce my own personal value set", even if it goes against local value sets.
ajkjk 6y ago
I don't buy the "argument from hypocrisy" at all. The situations are not symmetric because there is a right answer on each side and they give different results. Google should filter information when it's the right thing to do. It should not filter information when it's the wrong thing to do. The superficial symmetry of the two situations is completely irrelevant to which course of action is right and acceptable.
- zapdrive 6y ago
  And who decides what's wrong and what's right? You? Or, Google?
  - zpeti 6y ago
    Or the government? Which might be run by Donald trump, or Joe Biden.
  - 6y ago

r_singh 6y ago

The Indian leading party has over 3.2 million WhatsApp accounts. These groups are used during Election Day in many states to spread misinformation amongst gullible citizens and change the outcome on the last moment....

setum 6y ago
source, if any?
- r_singh 6y ago
  Watch this from 27:59 https://youtu.be/1OW7AQxpf2g https://youtu.be/1OW7AQxpf2g (Edit: it’s in Hindi)
  - pritambarhate 6y ago
    I am from India and know Hindi. The person in Video is Mr. Amit Shah. President of BJP and Home Minister of India. At the above timestamp he says (translation): Even if it is sour or sweet, truth or false we could spread it to people because we had created a group of 32 Lac (3.2 Million) people on Whatsapp.
    - r_singh 6y ago
      Apologies, revising previous comment because I misunderstood the said text. He indeed said that they created a WhatsApp account with 32 lakh people in it... Hence the translation above is correct.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - throwaway_s1234 6y ago
        > He said that we have created 32 lakh WhatsApp groups (not people). Don't lie man. Not cool at all! He said "Woh isliye hopaya ki hum battis lakh WhatsApp ka EK group banakar khade the". Which translates to "it happened because we created a WhatsApp group with 32 lakh people in it". You accuse a political party of spreading misinformation and you do that yourself! Did you seriously think you are the only one who knows Hindi in Hacker News and that you can get away with this lie? There is no need to even "listen carefully". It is as audible as it gets. 32 lakh WhatsApp groups is technically crazy to pull off unless done programmatically. And what is the point of 32 lakh WhatsApp groups? It serves no purpose to have so many groups.

acd10j 6y ago

I think they know that if they will not tow Ruling party (BJP) line they will lose another billion user market just like China. It is unfortunate that Modi Government is employing fascist/communist techniques of slowly killing democracy and dissent.

AndyMcConachie 6y ago

"Whistleblower points to double standard in Facebook’s enforcement of rules against powerful." Ya think? All of these articles about FB needing to block this or that are really missing the point. It's really quite simple. FB doesn't want to be regulated. The people who might regulate FB like Modi and the BJP. Therefore FB treats Modi and the BJP better. There is no universal standard we can apply to content regulation. We like to pretend that FB can somehow implement fairness. They couldn't even if they wanted to. There is no bright line between political advertising and non-political advertising. This entire discourse is facile. There is no universal set of rules we can apply to FB. FB is always going to act in deference to those who can regulate it and their friends.

chalst 6y ago
On the facts you're dead right but I reject the cynical framing. This is an important story because we want the truth to come out. It's why, for instance, the first impeachment of Trump was so important, even though you could correctly say there was no chance of success in the Senate. Because of this, safeguarding the integrity of the election becam important to a lot of people, and so Trump was unable to steal the election even with complete dominance over his party and a large, devotedly loyal mass movement behind him.

gigatexal 6y ago

Ugh. The BJP are Hindu nationalists that should be labeled as extremists — a bunch of Napoleon-complex-having-authoritarians... But India is the next big thing so all companies from Apple to Facebook and everyone in between will likely pander to the government. I’m East Indian but born in America (lucky me I guess) living in Berlin. I mean no disrespect to my fellow Indians just to convey my utter contempt for Modi and his thugs both the BJP and his gestapo the RSS.

anxiety554 6y ago
> The BJP are Hindu nationalists that should be labeled as extremists The core root of all the evil in India is the Vedas and its preaching on varna system(modern caste system). BJP is just another by product. Without educating the people on these text books its very hard to find a solution.
revendell_elf 6y ago
They should be labelled as extremists just like many other Islamic organizations in India who have been giving threats to make India an Islamic nation by killing all the Kafirs, right?
- reactspa 6y ago
  Every single political party in Pakistan is an islamic-nationalist party. Yet the Western media never describes them so. Yet the BJP is always suffixed with "hindu-nationalist". Israel has preferential citizenship for Jews. Yet, somehow India is not allowed to have CAA (per western media). Double standards, I suppose.
  - naturalauction 6y ago
    India is a supposedly secular country, it's stated in the constitution. Pakistan and Israel explicitly aren't. Also, you are totally wrong about "every single political party in Pakistan being an Islamic-nationalist party." The second biggest party in the Parliament is the Pakistan People's Party, who are secular. Additionally, Israel gets plenty of criticism in international media for its preferential citizenship laws regarding Jews.

known 6y ago

Facebook promoted a con-man / sociopath as savior of India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Narendra_Modi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Narendra_Modi

screye 6y ago

Does Facebook have lower standards towards politicians or BJP politicians ? I've seen Facebook and esp. Twitter take an active stance on censorship that goes far beyond banning spam. While this is a cut&dry case, the HN discussion is clearly centered around 'special treatment of those in power' at large. As I see it, fake news is a good 50-50 mix of actual fake news and a political perspective that is inconvenient to your agenda. This is especially true in India, where politics has always been the business of gangsters and liars. At this point, I'd be surprised if an Indian political rally by any party was less than 50% fake news. (In the sense that twitter censors it). Throwing unsubstantiated accusations towards your opponent is a grand political tradition that dates back thousands of years. To selectively silence one of them is to consciously pick sides. > “It’s not fair to have one justice system for the rich and important and one for everyone else, but that’s essentially the route that Facebook has carved out,” I'm not sure if I agree. Either a company as a service and it goes full 1st amendment, allowing any content that isn't illegal. Or, treat it as a profit making machine that optimizes for monetary gain. ___________ I personally lie on the 'Monopoly Social Media platforms' should have hard restrictions on what content they are allowed to moderate. Ads about Nigerian princes are banned, but Ponzi schemes and Goop get to keep advertising to billions. While I strongly lean left (socially), I find the reporting on Modi from top tier US news organizations to be just as biased and colored with agenda as many of the articles on the other side (fawning over him) that people are asking to be banned. It is quite hypocritical of left-leaning organizations in the west, to ask for 'objective standards of truth for others', but then turn around and say 'not for us, because we never lie'.

ameen 6y ago
Facebook has literally hired BJP aligned individuals: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-facebook-india-resigned-quit-bjp-hindu-muslim-conflict https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-faceb...
- screye 6y ago
  I don't see anything that indicates that she is aligned towards the BJP outside of one weak accusation that got her fired. As I said before, hate speech is the core of politics in India (sad as it is). If FB actually applied is hate speech rules in India, it would have to close shop the next day. I looked up every post on the 1st page of google, and couldn't find a single 1st source on what she actually did that was fire worthy. There were accusations and supposed hate speech / islamophobia, without any sources given for it. Her education was at JNU, which is India's left-wing ideological center. She works at Facebook, whose employees in the US lean socially left. Her father-in-law is a cabinet minister for one of BJP's biggest political enemies. Without any priors, I'd say she was more likely to help the left than the right. But, ofc, my speculation is just as unsubstantiated as the rest of the reporting surrounding her. ______ Links to the most credible sources or most clear accusations: [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgzGUTcUcAA4FGW?format=jpg&name=orig https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgzGUTcUcAA4FGW?format=jpg&name=... [2] https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-...

fallingfrog 6y ago

This is the new face of government control of the media. Turns out grassroots support can be faked. And of course, as we know from Amazon, corporations do it too.

EastSmith 6y ago

Keeping those fake profiles is campaign contribution.

ChoGGi 6y ago

"It’s not fair" Life isn't fair

robinhood 6y ago

Everything Facebook does nowadays is rotten. I don't see how I would trust this company in the future, unless they drastically change their business model.

ballenf 6y ago

Why do we expect tech companies to stand up to the people in charge of the countries where they operate? Is it because we hope and think that tech companies are somehow a new UN of sorts and we get disappointed when they don't live up to their ideals? I think part of it is that we've all bought into these companies PR departments' promulgation of values and core beliefs. Not realizing that those statements are little more than the ad campaigns that help them sell the most widgets and get the most engagement and hire the most idealistic employees. How many extra hours a week would you work for the company that professes to "share" your values?

thunkshift1 6y ago

While this definitely does not look good on fb, how is this different than, lets say newspapers and main stream media networks tongue-in-cheek supporting politicians of their preference? Why not have some transparency and fact check on that as well. The more I read these articles along the line of ‘social media/big tech bad. Real bad’ the more I see it as a turf war for influence between new and old forms of media, with end users/consumers faring worse in both.