Congress demands parliamentary probe into Facebook’s ‘manipulation’ of polls

Party writes to Mark Zuckerberg, accusing the firm of bias towards BJP

The Congress on Friday wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, protesting against “apparent and evident” bias of Facebook towards the ruling dispensation and demanded a joint parliamentary committee probe into alleged manipulation of elections by the U.S. based tech firm.

Congress’s social media in charge Rohan Gupta shot off the letter to Mr. Zuckerberg, saying that in the last two years, an abundance of evidence had been released that point to the negligence by the company in controlling hate speech. “I want to bring to your notice the apparent and evident bias that your company has shown in our country towards the ruling dispensation despite their proclivity for sharing hate speech, misinformation, fake news and inflammatory content on your platform,” he said.

An internal report of Facebook, authored by an employee in February 2019, based on findings of a test account, showed that post the February 14 Pulwama terror attack, users had seen “more images of dead people in the past three weeks than seen in their entire life”. The report also pointed out that the AI (Artificial Intelligence) that Facebook used was not adequate to identify vernacular languages.