Parliamentary Committee questions Facebook India MD Ajit Mohan on social media misuse

The hearing comes amid growing heat on the social media platform following reports that a senior executive for public policy had asked her team not to apply "hate-speech rules" to certain posts of BJP politicians.

While the Congress had written to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last month about the allegations, the BJP government, and to be specific the IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday shot off a scathing letter to Zuckerberg, alleging that the Facebook India senior management, including the managing director, belonged to a "political belief" that has been "defeated" in successive elections.

Raising "serious concerns", Prasad called on the Facebook CEO to put in place country-specific community guidelines, and said that the company's outsourcing of fact-checking to a third party is a "major issue".

Prasad's allegations include that Facebook India management had made a concerted effort during the 2019 general elections to delete pages and offered no recourse to people "supportive of right-of-centre ideology".

On recent media reports, Prasad said "there is collusion of a group of Facebook employees with international media".

"This interference in India's political process through gossip, whispers and innuendo is condemnable," the minister wrote in the letter shared on Tuesday.

Facebook did not offer any statement on the letter nor on the parliamentary committee meet.

In a blog post on August 21, Mohan said that the company's community standards have policies against hate speech and that Facebook had removed content posted by public figures in India when it violated the community standards.

Facebook said it removed 22.5 million pieces of hate speech content globally in the second quarter of 2020.