It is not known if Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is colour blind to saffron, as he is known to suffer from a deformity called deuteranopia, a form of colour blindness that makes it difficult for someone to distinguish between colours. But he has no problems with blue.

Another instead of reasons for opting blue was that it also lent a conceptual framework for the colour scheme. Blue and white as body and background, or vice versa, used in combination, is supposed to represent purity and optimism.

In any case, Facebook does not seem to be averse to saffron. A Wall Street Journal has stirred a hornet’s nest by carrying a report, which said how Ankhi Das, Facebook’s public policy executive for India, has put pressure on her company to ignore its otherwise strict hate speech norms, when it comes to accounts of BJP activists and followers.

The newspaper cited four instances of such bending of rules in favour of the ruling party, including the one by Telangana BJP legislator Raja Singh, amounting to communally provocative statements, one of which even called for violence against minorities.

According to the report, officials monitoring content on the platform had concluded that the BJP MLA not only had violated the company’s hate-speech rules but qualified as dangerous. It then quoted ‘current and former Facebook employees’ to say that Ankhi Das intervened on behalf of the BJP as ‘part of a broader pattern of favouritism by Facebook toward Modi’s BJP and Hindu hard-liners’. Singh has claimed that the offending content was not posted by him.

The report also referred to posts by BJP MP Anantkumar Hegde, who alleged that Muslims were spreading Covid-19 in India in a conspiracy to wage ‘Corona Jihad’. Such allegations clearly violate Facebook’s hate speech rules, but the platform took no action. WSJ claims that Facebook removed the posts only after it sought comments from the platform’s officials. Twitter had promptly suspended Hegde’s account as a result of such posts.

The WSJ report highlighted how important the Indian market was for the business of Facebook, as the platform is banned in China, the only other country with the potential of a billion customers. India has more Facebook and WhatsApp users than any other country in the world and Zuckerberg and his team know how suicidal it will be to earn the displeasure of the ruling dispensation.

It is not just the prospects of Reliance telecom giant Jio that prompted Facebook to invest $5.7 billion or Rs 43,574 crore in it, making Facebook its largest minority shareholder. The investment makes perfect sense for the key social media player to further fortify its empire in India. Matrimony has been established practice among princely states of India to consolidate their political stability. So the Jio-Facebook alliance can be considered to be true to Indian tradition.

The WSJ expose has let off a political storm, with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi alleging that it is the BJP and RSS that ‘control Facebook and WhatsApp’ and use the platforms to influence the electorate.

As usual, IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was quick with his counter, accusing the Congress of hiring the dubious firm Cambridge Analytica where a whistle-blower had claimed that the Congress had lost control over access to its data.

Ravi Shankar Prasad can have the satisfaction of answering Rahul Gandhi, but his response is not good enough for the people of India, who are much more than the Congress party, truncated and ‘rudderless’, as some of their own men have complained.

Manipulation of social media platforms is one of the biggest threats faced by democracy all over the world. In countries such as the US, there are well-defined safeguards against such misuse and Zuckerberg himself has been on the mat on several occasions, inviting the wrath of the regulators.

But in India, with its weakened institutions, the misuse of social media platforms is fraught with serious danger to democratic systems and traditions. With the ruling establishment itself being a party to such fraud, there is no hope for regulatory weight coming down on players like Facebook, which are keen to protect their turf even if it demands a heavy cost in terms of principles and propriety.

The parliamentary committee on Information Technology under the chairmanship of Shashi Tharoor, has said it will look into the WSJ report and seek the response of Facebook. But given the track record of such committees in India, it is not difficult to imagine what the outcome will be like. (IPA Service)