New Delhi: Company documents and communications shared by a Meta (formerly Facebook) whistleblower to a parliamentary committee names BJP MP Vinod Sonkar as having run a network of fake accounts that Facebook did not act on despite being flagged for takedown, according to copies seen by HT.
The decision to leave the network up, in the run up to Delhi elections in 2020, adds to a list of seemingly preferential treatment given by the company to some political parties, and Sonkar is the second known politician whose activity on the company’s main social network service was left untouched. Wall Street Journal reported the company did not impose a ban on Telangana BJP leader T Raja despite him violating trust and safety rules through what was classified as hate speech.
“If they had information about fake accounts then they should have blocked them. My page has been verified by them. Why were they allowing fake accounts to operate,” Sonkar said.
According to a document titled India Fake Accounts, the content moderation teams flagged clusters of political spam accounts run by the Aam Aadmi Party, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The company’s then India public policy director, Shivraj Thukral, approved the takedown of the first two but did not respond on the pro-BJP network.
Thukral did not respond to HT’s request for comment.
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