Are Facebook’s community guidelines selectively policing anti-government content?
January 30, 2019 The Caravan
Inji Pennu
Inji Pennu
On 25 July 2018, Unofficial PMO India, a Facebook page which then had 2,51,000 followers and regularly uploaded memes against the current NDA government, ran afoul of the social media platform’s community standards—a set of rules that “outline what is and what is not allowed on Facebook…and apply around the world to all types of content.” The page’s troubles began after it uploaded a collage of a picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi pinching the ears of a child, juxtaposed with an image of Adolf Hitler in a similar photo op. The image was removed by Facebook within hours of uploading and the page followed soon after. The page is run by Farza, a friend who is based out of Mumbai, and three other people. Just after the page was pulled down, Farza called me in a panic. He was worried that with the image and page gone, his personal account would be next in line. A few hours later, the personal profiles of all the page administrators, including Farza, were suspended for 30 days. “What to do?” Farza asked me, in another emergency call from miles away. I did not have a clear answer.
For years now, every week I receive similar panic calls from Facebook users whose accounts have been suspended for violating unspecified aspects of the community standards. Every such call was from users who posted content against the Narendra Modi government and its ideological associates. Since 2015, I have documented every call I received to understand whether these are all mere coincidences on account of faulty algorithms or if there is an agenda to Facebook’s suspensions. The duration of suspensions ranged from one to thirty days, and in a handful of cases, even more. There was no clarity on what content attracted what duration of suspension.
After three years of tabulating this data, a pattern has emerged. All the suspended profiles I dealt with were barred on the pretext of enforcing Facebook’s community standards. As I noticed recurring patterns, I tabulated a majority of the suspended profiles into three categories of Facebook activity—upload of memes against Narendra Modi; protests against the ruling government’s policies; sharing content which comes under the previous two categories. In all cases, no clear reason was ever provided as to which post broke the community rule or which community guidelines were not adhered to. These clarifications were not provided even after the profiles were reinstated.
With 270 million active users in India, and 2.27 billion monthly active users worldwide, Facebook, with its multifaceted social-media platforms, has colossal social and economic impact. In this Facebook country, what constituted the community standards was a mystery until April 2018, when the company finally opened up the guidelines to the public. Speaking on the occasion, Monika Bickert, the head of product policy and counterterrorism at Facebook, told Reuters, “The Community Standards guidelines are not a static set of policies. The rules change often.” Bickert said that every two weeks she leads a content-standards forum, where senior executives meet to review the social network’s policies for taking down objectionable content. The group, which comprises executives from the company’s policy division, also receives inputs from more than a hundred external organisations and experts on areas of concern, such as child exploitation and terrorism.
But how these community policies are formed or changed is still not available for an audit. A changing community policy is like a changing constitution—hard to stabilise. In the cracks of these changes, Facebook thrives as a banana republic of the digital world. Digital-rights groups have been requesting to audit Facebook’s community standards algorithms for years due to its caustic social impact, to no avail.
fMy findings dwell on how Facebook has deflected in India, curtailed freedom of speech on many occasions and when questioned, dragged its feet. In 2016, 11 profile owners approached me to ask for help with reinstating their accounts. In 2017, the numbers went up to 26, a jump of more than 50 percent. In 2018, it became a regular affair for me to be contacted about one profile every two weeks.
2On 25 May 2016, the well-known left-wing activist Kavita Krishnan was threatened with physical rape on Facebook. She approached me when her attempts to get Facebook to take action against the person threatening her were met with silence. In an attempt to escalate the issue, I reached out to Bickert. Bickert wrote me a lengthy email, stating that Facebook was a safe place for women, but that it had a different set of community guidelines for “celebrity” women. Facebook refused to take down the post threatening Krishnan.
fter the campaign against the real name policy, Facebook started to deploy various criteria for judging profiles, such as nudity and violence, but none of these turned out to be valid when profiles were pulled down. When I continually reported gender violence, such as that faced by Krishnan, not a single profile took a hit. But for anti-Modi critics, a simple phrase such as “orange monkey” came under Facebook’s radar as profanity. Take the case of Rajiv Tyagi. A popular social-media influencer figure, columnist and an erstwhile Indian Air Force officer, Rajiv Tyagi was suspended twice—once in 2016 and then again in 2018. His posts are popular for their scathing criticism of the Modi government. On 24 August 2018, he was blocked for 30 days for calling out a profile of a user who appeared to be right-leaning. In his email to me, he wrote, “I have been blocked for commenting in a discussion thread on my wall, words to the effect, ‘Why do you have an orange bandar (monkey in Hindi) as your dp? I thought we had evolved from monkeys a long time ago...’!” Tyagi continued, “I cannot imagine how such a comment violates Facebook’s ‘community standards’ so violently, that I get blocked for 30 days!” When escalated, Facebook did not respond to my queries as to why the profile was suspended, as has been the case with every profile I have intervened on behalf of. Tyagi’s profile was restored on 31 August.
Independent media organisations, especially start-ups, also seem to have had a similar experience with Facebook. In the cases I came across, Facebook appeared to have marketed to them aggressively and invited them to have a space on their platform, promising wide reach and advertising. But when these media outlets did not toe the current government’s line, their profiles often got suspended. The reasons provided by Facebook in such cases have invariably turned out to be ambiguous and, when pressed for further detail, Facebook has always attributed the suspensions to bugs. One could only surmise that the attempt was to push independent media to submit to its demands and monitor them. Out of the few such media outlets that contacted me, Vartha Bharati, a Kannada daily, and BFirst, a liberal news portal started by journalists, faced suspension. These publications even lost the money they spent on Facebook advertisements because their profiles were suspended and they could not get any traffic.
iSimilarly, there is the case of Deepak Sharma, a Facebook user from Rajasthan, who constantly posts hate speech against Muslims and women. He uses Facebook Live often and constantly threatens to wipe out Muslims. On 16 December 2018, he posted a video with similar threats. The video now has 77,000 views, 1,056 shares, 980 comments and 1,400 reactions. I, along with a few other digital activists, reported this post using Facebook’s community guidelines. Facebook responded that the content of the video does not go against their community guidelines—the standard response to Hindutva hate pages. How is it that Facebook cannot monitor such hate content when anything against Narendra Modi or the alternative right is taken down immediately?
On 6 October 2018, Caravan Daily reported, “Since the last week of September, Facebook has disabled personal accounts of several leading journalists including Ajay Prakash (News Editor, Dainik Bhaskar), Prerna Negi (Editor, Janjwar.com), Rifat Jawaid (Editor, JanataKaRepoter.com and former Editor of BBC) and Aijaz Zaka Syed, an award-winning Indian journalist and columnist based in the Gulf and former Opinion editor, Khaleej Times. Syed has also been associated with Caravan Daily as a columnist. In addition, Facebook disabled accounts of editors of BoltaHindustan.com, and Mumtaz Alam, Editor of Caravan Daily and Syed Ghazanfar Abbas, National Correspondent of Caravan Daily.” All these accounts and profiles were suspended without any prior notice for violating Facebook’s community standards.
As I examined these cases, a clear pattern emerged on how Facebook’s algorithm was written and manipulated. The algorithm targets only a certain section of the profiles, for reasons only Facebook is privy to. As the frequency of suspension has increased, I noticed that now when profiles are down, activists and independent observers just wait out the suspension period. Evidently, activists critical of the government are losing their voice on social media against Facebook’s black-box policies. Speaking with activists, I have observed that once a profile is out of the feeds for 30 days, its earlier fiery vigour is also lost. This is the carrot and stick, where freedom of speech is curtailed randomly and frequently without fully stopping it and the information dissemination velocity is lost.
IIn 2015, while meeting with Bickert and her team, I discussed the gaps in Facebook’s policing of right-wing fundamentalists groups, women activists facing death and rape threats. I was trying to impress upon them that Facebook’s approach was woefully inadequate to understand the cultural sensitivity of India, the colloquial and native language nuances, and how the FAQ’s on community guidelines would not work. Ankhi Das, who is Facebook’s Public Policy Director for South Asia, snapped back at me, “You are living in US, you won’t understand India.” Maya Leela, an activist who is also a friend, was present there and heard Das’s response. Das’s retort sounded familiar to me—it was the language of Hindutva trolls.
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