The documents submitted by Haugen note that despite Facebook being alerted about fake accounts being made on the platform it did not take any actions.
The controversy surrounding Facebook is far from being over. Facebook has repeatedly come under fire over the past few years for its role in disseminating misinformation and not taking any action against hate speech.
Now former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen has come up with documents submitted to the US Congress and United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by his legal counsel.
The documents submitted by Haugen note that despite Facebook officials being alerted about fake accounts being made on the platform to polarize and encourage hate in India, Facebook did not take any actions.
As per the disclosures, several red flags concerning its operations in India were raised internally within the company between 2018 and 2020. These glaring gaps in response are revealed in the documents.
The documents highlight that despite the red flags being raised in an internal review meeting in 2019 Chris Cox, the then Facebook Vice President found a comparatively low prevalence of problem content on the platform.
The document says that the review meetings with the then Vice President took place a month before the Election Commission of India announced the Lok Sabha election schedule on April 11, 2019.
Two reports flagging hate speech and 'problem content' were presented in January-February 2019, months before the Lok Sabha elections in India. A third report was presented in August 2020.
Facebook admitted that the platform's AI (artificial intelligence) tools were unable to identify vernacular languages and had, therefore, failed to identify hate speech or problematic content.
However, the documents submitted claim that minutes of the meeting with Chris Cox concluded that, "Survey tells us that people generally feel safe. Experts tell us that the country is relatively stable."
The first report, "Adversarial Harmful Networks: India Case Study" noted that as high as 40% of sampled top VPV postings in West Bengal were either fake or inauthentic.
The second report by an employee in February 2019, notes that in just three weeks, a dummy user's news feed had become a near-constant barrage of polarizing nationalistic content and misinformation.
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 "Facebook ignored hate speech in India")
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