89 Global News Post 3

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/technology/facebook-india-misinformation.html by Sheera Frenkel and Davey Alba

BBC. (2015). Mark Zuckerberg welcomed the Indian prime minister to Facebook’s campus last year.

With the rise of social media, there’s a larger spread of misinformation. For example, recently people began to worry about the effects misinformation can have on political elections. Facebook has a lot of responsibility to control this and other forms of misinformation and hate speech that happen on their platform since it has the leading amount of users compared to other social media platforms. This New York Times article describes how Facebook has been used to spread an immense amount of misinformation and violence in India.

The article’s authors Sheera Frenkel and Davey Alba are technology reporters that both have experience writing about Facebook. In this article, they begin talking about an experiment where a Facebook researcher uses Facebook as if they were living in India. This experiment resulted in the researcher finding large amounts of misinformation, hate speech, and acts of violence shared on the platform, even including many images of dead people. The article also shares how Facebook has shown that it only focuses on these issues in the US, such as taking measures specifically during the US election.

India is Facebook’s largest market according to the article. Yet the platform works to limit misinformation in other places while basically, ignoring the global south altogether. In fact, a Rest of the World webpage also shares that while Facebook has algorithms to find hate speech they do not in Hindi or Bengali; largely spoken languages that are used on Facebook. What Facebook’s underinvestment has led to is a large amount of hate and violence, especially against Muslims. Muslims have increasingly been experiencing violence in India and it’s possible that Facebook or other social media platforms have influenced this since they aren’t controlled. It’s up to Facebook and other platforms to regulate their platforms and make them a safe space for everyone to use.

References

Elliott, V., Christopher, N., Deck, A., & Schwartz, L. (2021, October). The Facebook Papers reveal staggering failures in the Global South. Rest of World. https://restofworld.org/2021/facebook-papers-reveal-staggering-failures-in-global-south/

Frenkel, S., & Alba, D. (2021, October). In India, Facebook Grapples With an Amplified Version of Its Problems. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/technology/facebook-india-misinformation.html

Getty Images. (2016, November). Mark Zuckerberg welcomed the Indian prime minister to Facebook’s campus last year [Photograph]. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38036730