The parliamentary committee on information technology on Wednesday asked Facebook about the steps it has taken to deal with fake news on its platform, and told the social media company that it seemed “unwilling to be scrutinised” despite having made “mistakes” in the recent past.
Facebook executives conceded that the platform did not “always get it right” on content moderation, a panel member told ET , speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Facebook group vice-president for global public policy Joel D Kaplan, who attended the meeting along with India managing director Ajit Mohan, told the committee that the company was “eager to engage on the right regulatory framework”, the panel member said.
The committee underscored the need to safeguard data and check any kind of interference in conducting free and fair elections. It asked Facebook to respond to posts spreading fake news, hate speech, communal tension, threat to national security in real time as the country heads into general elections.
For this, it asked the platform to be more prompt to issues flagged by the Election Commission. The executives at the hearing failed to answer questions on the laws applicable to the social media platform and its subsidiaries, WhatsApp and Instagram, in India, said the member. This led some members to cite a British parliamentary panel report that had questioned Facebook’s management structure.
Saying that Facebook needed to usher in more transparency, an MP asked: “Who fact checks the fact checker?”
Two non-BJP MPs, one from Punjab and the another from West Bengal, voiced their “disgust” over alleged inaction by Facebook. While one MP complained that his account had been “banned”, the other said his handle had been “cloned”. Both said their repeated representations seeking redressal had gone unheard. One of the MPs said he would be constrained to take legal recourse if his grievance was not redressed.
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