Hashtag 'Anti-India Facebook' dominates Twitter

NEW DELHI: Newspaper Wall Street Journal’s report claiming that the BJP exercises "undue influence" over Facebook dominated social media on Sunday.
The online attack against the BJP was primarily led by Congress politicians with the hashtag, Anti-India Facebook (41k) trending on Twitter for several hours. This was also countered by BJP politicians, who alleged that the Congress was involved in the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal making the 2018 controversy a talking point in the evening.
The 2018 CA leak by whistleblower Christopher Wylie had revealed that user data of over 80 million Facebook users, mostly Americans, was allegedly harvested without consent by CA for political advertising.
Trinamool Congress's Derek O'Brien referred to the WSJ article, and wrote, "I have spoken about the bias of Facebook on the floor of #Parliament." Other politicans who referred to the article included radical Left's Kavita Krishnan and Dalit Army's Yash Meghwal.
The Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper had alleged in an article that Facebook is guided by "political considerations" when it applies hate speech rules to prominent Hindu nationalists in India and had implicated the company's top public policy official Ankhi Das in not pulling down content, which could have caused "real-world violence" against a particular community.
Congress's Shashi Tharoor, who is a part of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT, tweeted, "The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology would certainly wish to hear from @Facebook about these reports & what they propose to do about hate-speech in India.”
BJP politician Kapil Mishra, whose controversial comment had been cited as an example of "hate speech" by Zuckerberg sometime back, also responded to Rahul Gandhi's tweet. "Seems Congress is blackmailing facebook to hide some serious crimes ... Cambridge Analytica scam is just tip of the iceberg of Congress manipulating opinions and freedom of expression in India," he wrote. Gandhi had tweeted that “BJP & RSS control Facebook & Whatsapp in India.”
Congress digital communications member Gaurav Pandhi wrote, "By enabling communal hate of BJP, @Facebook is running down Mahatma Gandhi's values basis which our Independent India was founded. #AntiIndiaFacebook. The details of Zuckerberg's company favouring hate speech in India for commercial success are disturbing."