Calls for accountability continue at Facebook, as whistleblowers Frances Haugen and Sophie Zhang, former Facebook Vice President Brian Boland, and 25 advocacy organizations sent a letter to Facebook’s (now Meta) Director of Human Rights Miranda Sissons on January 19. The letter urges the company to release the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA), which Facebook commissioned in 2020. The HRIA works to “evaluate [Facebook’s] role in spreading hate speech and incitement to violence on its services in India.”

The Facebook whistleblowers and organizations explain that Facebook commissioned Foley Hoag, a law firm, to conduct the HRIA in 2020, but the findings have yet to be released. The letter cites a recent article in The Wall Street Journal that reports Facebook is actually stifling the publication of the report.

The signatories of the letter highlight aspects of Haugen’s disclosures, which claim that “there is an epidemic of hate speech and disinformation on Facebook’s platforms in India, particularly targeting Muslims and other minority groups.” The letter states that while a lot of this type of content “violates community standards,” it has yet to be removed from the site, “partly because Facebook has not allocated nearly enough resources to tackling the problem.” The letter also mentions Wall Street Journal reporting of “troubling reports of a pattern of favoritism by FB India toward the ruling BJP party in India, as well as ties between a former FB India staff and the...

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