Meta shareholders vote against probe on hate speech

Shareholders of Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, have voted against a proposal to probe the company’s political entanglements and content moderation biases in India.

Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), one of the Indian campaigners of the proposal, titled Assessing Allegations of Biased Operations in Meta’s Largest Market, tweeted on Thursday: “Unfortunately, as per the preliminary voting outcomes, the vote was not in favour of Proposal 7.”

International advocacy group, Eko, had raised the proposal while local groups — India Civil Watch International (ICWI) and IFF — had campaigned for it in the run-up to Meta’s annual general meeting on May 31 when the voting took place. Out of a total of 13, Proposal 7 was the only one that focussed on India.

Tejasi Panjiar, associate policy counsel at Delhi-based IFF, told Metrolife that final results will be announced a day or two after the audit is complete or voting is rechecked. However, they are not hopeful of a positive outcome, she said.

What is Proposal 7?

As per the IFF website, the proposal documents instances like the 2020 Delhi riots where hate speech on Meta allegedly fuelled violence. Reports also indicate that Facebook may have allowed political parties to promote surrogate advertisements, it adds.

The proposal demands a non-partisan inquiry on how the platform has been utilised to foment ethnic and religious violence in India, and an assessment of the institutional capacity to moderate divisive content in 22 official Indian languages. This is significant because India is heading for general elections in 2024, Tejasi said.

“Our campaign is the beginning of a broader campaign to safeguard our elections and democracy from the misuse of social media. Currently the influence of social media on elections goes unchecked. We have a fairly robust code of conduct that scrutinises election campaigns on ground or in conventional media. But the same hasn’t been translated for online campaigns,” said Tejasi.

Before the 2019 general elections, in a joint statement, IFF had made an appeal to the Election Commission of India (ECI) to analyse the impact of digital platforms on elections. Nothing has changed, she claimed.

They had demanded the ECI monitor the online spending of political parties, ask parties and candidates to declare their official handles, conduct an audit on the declaration processes of political ads, set up a nodal office to address fake news, sensitise public to report violations, place curbs on data theft, etc.