Facebook stalling report on human rights impact in India, allege whistleblowers

Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen and other prominent whistleblowers have renewed calls for Facebook to release a long-awaited report on its impact in India, alleging the company is purposely obscuring human rights concerns.

More than 20 organizations on Wednesday joined whistleblowers Frances Haugen and Sophie Zhang, as well as former Facebook vice-president Brian Boland, to demand the company, now called Meta, release its findings.

Calls for more information on how hate speech plays out on Meta platforms in India intensified when Haugen leaked internal documents in 2021 showing how the the company struggles to monitor problematic content in countries with large user bases.

The papers revealed in particular how users in India were inundated with fake news, hate speech including anti-Muslim posts and bots interfering with elections. These papers underscored an ongoing critique that the company does not allocate proportional resources to its larger, non-English markets.

Haugen revealed in her papers and testimony to Congress that Facebook has earmarked only 13% of its global misinformation budget to non-US countries, though Americans make up just 10% of its active daily user base.

Such funding issues are particularly stark in countries like India, which has 22 official languages, said Teesta Setalvad, an Indian civil rights activist and journalist, in a press conference on Wednesday.

Reuters contributed to this report