Upto now, social dilemma projected polarisation of content as a "collateral damage" for their quest for eye-balls. Whistleblower says Facebook put profit before reining in hate speech https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/whistleblower-says-facebook-put-profit-before-reining-in-hate-speech-7550582/ But the following reports make it clear that political positions are being taken. Frances Haugen: added that Facebook was used to help organize the Capitol riot on January 6, after the company turned off safety systems following the U.S. presidential elections. While she believed no one at Facebook was “malevolent,” she said the company had misaligned incentives.
Pre and post 2019 polls: Facebook memos flag anti-minority post surge by Aashish Aryan , Karunjit Singh , Pranav Mukul November 11, 2021 https://indianexpress.com/article/india/facebook-india-hate-speech-7617437/
A July 2020 report specifically noted there was a marked rise in such posts in the preceding 18 months, and that the sentiment was “likely to feature” in the coming Assembly elections, including West Bengal.
The increase in hate speech and inflammatory content was mostly centred around “themes” of threats of violence, Covid-related misinformation involving minority groups, and “false” reports of Muslims engaging in communal violence. In one internal report in 2021 before the Assembly elections in Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, now Assam Chief Minister, was flagged in as being party to trafficking inflammatory rumours about “Muslims pursuing biological attacks against Assamese people by using chemical fertilizers to produce liver, kidney and heart disease in Assamese.”
Despite all these red flags, another group of staffers at the social media firm suggested only a “stronger time-bound demotion” of such content.
Asked if the social media platform took any measures to implement these recommendations, a spokesperson for Meta Platforms Inc — Facebook was rebranded as Meta on October 28 — told The Indian Express: “Our teams were closely tracking the many possible risks associated with the elections in Assam this year, and we proactively put in place a number of emergency measures to reduce the virality of inflammatory comments, particularly videos. Videos featuring inflammatory content were identified as high risk during the election, and we implemented a measure to help prevent these videos from automatically playing in someone’s video feed”.
3 staff memos flagged ‘polarising’ content, hate speech in India but Facebook said not a problem https://indianexpress.com/article/india/3-staff-memos-flagged-polarising-content-hate-speech-in-india-but-facebook-said-not-a-problem-7615684/ A spokesperson for Meta Platforms Inc said: “We had hate speech classifiers in Hindi and Bengali from 2018. Classifiers for violence and incitement in Hindi and Bengali first came online in early 2021”.
FROM a “constant barrage of polarising nationalistic content”, to “fake or inauthentic” messaging, from “misinformation” to content “denigrating” minority communities, several red flags concerning its operations in India were raised internally in Facebook between 2018 and 2020.
However, despite these explicit alerts by staff mandated to undertake oversight functions, an internal review meeting in 2019 with Chris Cox, then Vice President, Facebook, found “comparatively low prevalence of problem content (hate speech, etc)” on the platform.
