In yet another chapter of the dispute between the indian government and social networks, Facebook was going to remove several fake accounts identified on the platform. However, the company backtracked after realizing that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-wing populist party, Bharatiya Janata (Indian People's Party), was directly linked to the profiles.

In other words, the social network allowed the Indian government to artificially increase its popularity on the platform, violating its usage policies. High-ranking party members have already imposed sanctions on Twitter and have stated several times that they are willing to block social networks that do not follow local political determinations.

The person who discovered the network of fake accounts was Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist who shared the data with the company. “It’s not fair to have one justice system for the rich and important and another for everyone else, but that’s essentially the route that Facebook has created,” she said in an interview with The Guardian.

Facebook and India

This is not the first time Facebook has acted laxly towards the ruling party. The Hindu nationalist party has also benefited from the platform after violating its terms of use. The details were given in a report from August last year by Wall Street Journal.

“Politicians in India are ahead of the curve when it comes to It is about adopting these manipulation techniques and so this leveraging of social media for political ends is to be expected,” said Nikhil Pahwa, an Indian digital rights activist and founder of MediaNama.

According to The Guardian, after Zhang's alert in December, an investigator from Facebook's intelligence team located the network of fake accounts and ordered the profiles to be terminated for violating one of the platform's most important rules.

In the same month, the same employee was preparing to delete the profiles when he confirmed the block in Facebook's task management system. Until one of the accounts was marked as “Government Partner” and “High Priority – Indiana” and the employee refused.

Facebook told the newspaper that it blocked most of the accounts linked to the Indian government identified as fake. However, after The Guardian sent the report with the profiles, Mark Zuckerberg's company said it was still investigating the case.

Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. The Guardian

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