WITH 340 million users, India is Facebook's largest market. But the subcontinent may be the company's undoing, too. So hints "The Facebook Papers," a cache of internal documents obtained by a consortium of media organisations, including The New York Times.
The documents, many of which were revealed to the United States' Senate sub-committee recently and to the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier by former employee Frances Haugen, tell of bots and fake accounts wreaking havoc in India through hate content.
A Bloomberg report of "The Facebook Papers" describes the abominable content thus: graphic photos of beheadings, doctored images of India's airstrikes against Pakistan and jingoistic scenes of violence. It's a surprise such fake contents didn't cause a war between the two nuclear powers.
Facebook is aware of this and it has done little to either block or get rid of harmful content on its social platforms in the subcontinent. Facebook's own research, "Adversarial Harmful Networks: India Case Study" highlighted by the NYT supports this take.
There it is a story of groups and pages "replete with inflammatory and misleading anti-Muslim content". Much of this, says the newspaper, is "material circulated on Facebook groups promoting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an Indian right-wing and nationalist group with close ties to India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party".
Despite statements to the contrary by Facebook and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, the social media platform isn't putting its money where its mouth is. Here is why.
A Saturday NYT report quoting Facebook's allocation of resources document says it all: 87 per cent of the company's global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation is earmarked for the US, while only 13 per cent is set aside for the rest of the world — even though North American users make up only 10 per cent of the social network's daily active users.
Thirteen per cent for 199 countries and territories in the world? Facebook has taken issue with the newspaper's numbers, saying that they don't include third-party fact-checkers, but it must admit it is still one lopsided focus.
Not that Facebook hasn't done any field work in India. Not for a year or two, but for several years, says the NYT. One such was in late January 2019, the findings of which are now major headlines around the world.
A memo written by a Facebook researcher after the Indian trip reveals pleas by users to the company to "take action on types of misinformation that are connected to real-world harm, specifically politics and religious group tension". Did Facebook do something about the pleas?
No, if the continuing incendiary content — much of it dehumanising to ethnic minorities — is anything to go by. Facebook needs to do a few things if it wants to save itself from ruin.
Firstly, it must get its principles right. The primary one of which is that people must always come before profit, not the other way around. Or in Haugen's words, Facebook shouldn't put "astronomical profits before people".
Secondly, Facebook must get its moral compass right. Allowing incendiary content, for whatever reason, is reprehensible. Know this. Inflammatory content kills. Blaming algorithms and checkers isn't going to absolve the company.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, Facebook needs to learn the lay of the land where it does business. Not just the physical geography, but the geography of the minds of men and women there. If Facebook doesn't want to be "unliked", that is.