Facebook V-P to depose before House panel on March 6

IANS  |  New Delhi 

will appear before the (IT), here on March 6, to what it and its subsidiaries and are doing to safeguard the citizen rights across platforms.

Ajit Mohan, and Managing Editor of India, and Ankhi Das, (Public, Policy and Programmes) will accompany Kaplan, sources said.

or are not travelling to for the hearing.

officials' presentation will follow appearance of Colin Crowell, Global (Public Policy) of Twitter, before the Anurag Thakur-led panel on February 25. Crowell had spoken about how the microblogging site would help address issues like political bias and manipulation on its platform.

was also asked to reply to some of the unanswered queries within 10 days.

In his tweeet last month, Thakur said: "The will now examine the issue of 'safeguarding citizen rights on social/online news platforms'. The following will present their positions: Facebook, WhatsApp, "

As gears up for general elections, global platforms are discussing how to curb misinformation and fake news in a country where mobile penetration has helped Facebook, and reach millions of users.

Facebook has close to 300 million users and over 200 million. According to statista.com, Instagram has nearly 75 million users in

In the runup to the Lok Sabha polls, Facebook has introduced a new tool to bring transparency to ads related to politics.

Anyone who runs ads related to politics will have to reveal their identity and location to pass the authorisation process and have a "Published by" or "Paid for by" label.

"The tool comes with some India-specific features," Shivnath Thukral, Facebook's Public Policy for India and South Asia, told IANS recently.

"The law of the land does not require us to make the 'Paid for by' label mandatory in India," Thukral said.

Another India-first feature that Facebook has introduced is that advertisers can begin the authorisations on their itself instead of logging in to a desktop.

For registered political parties in India, Facebook has also introduced an option to upload certification and monitoring committee certificate from the of India.

"In our conversation with Election Commission, we learnt it is essential to give political parties the option to upload the certificate," Thukral said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

First Published: Sun, March 03 2019. 16:48 IST