FACEBOOK Will Deploy Task Force to Curb Growing Hate Speeches
WORRIED about misuse of social media, Facebook has decided to encourage interaction between people and political leaders to help conduct of ‘free and fair elections’ and deploy task force to check hate speeches during coming elections in five states.“We want our platform to support free and fair election and positive civic engagement. We welcome people to engage with their political leaders but we don’t want people to abuse that,” Facebook Vice President for Public Policy EMEA Richard Allan told media people at New Delhi on Friday last. He admitted that the social media giant was facing flak for misuse of its platform for manipulating views during elections and spreading hate speech , campaign .Facebook has come up with a policy around hate speech under which it removes content that intend to spread hate speech and violence. Allan said that the abuse differs from country to country but principle is same, and Facebook is accordingly fine tuning its policy to address the issue.”When we see elections coming up, obviously India is top of mind, biggest democracy in the world, so we have a task force working on that -security specialist, content specialist. We trying to understand what is possible form of abuse in India versus UK versus any other country,” he said.Assembly elections are due in five states — Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram.Facebook blocks content using automation as well as through experts after scrutinising it. The social media major has developed its guidelines based on feedback from local community experts.”We have a general policy that applies all across the world. As we have looked issues in different country, one of the things that came out was that there is a view that hate speech is directed against people in India, in particular, and Indians outside India also. They may direct hate speech against each other on the basis of …Caste,” Allan said.He said that one should not carry out hate speech attack based on gender, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religion etc.Allan said that attacking a concept or saying someone that he doesn’t like a religion is not a hate speech. However, one can not say that he hates followers of that religion or concept.”Trust is very clear distinction between no liking a concept, not liking an idea. Some people find that controversial. They feel attacking religion is same as attacking the same as followers,” Allan said. He said that the company has policy against excessively violent content and hate speech. The Vice President of Facebook said that the company has developed good capacity to remove terrorist content, child abuse images and other images that cannot be legally shared through automation. Facebook has plans to have around 20,000 people working across different aspect of building the automation tools, security and content review to check hate speech. Meanwhile, it is reported that personal data of Face book’s 300 million users have been unauthorizedly lifted as India is approaching parliamentary elections after assembly polls in five states.