Misinformation bloomed during the pandemic in India. Facebook’s struggle with misinformation, hate speech and celebrations of violence is at a fever pitch in India, its biggest market, according to internal documents.
Bots and fake accounts tied to the country’s ruling party and opposition figures wreaked havoc on national elections. Anti-Muslim posts also proliferated.
In one instance, a Facebook researcher created a new account to test the experience of a user in the state of Kerala, and then directed the account to follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms. “Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the researcher wrote in an internal report.
Only 10 percent of Facebook’s daily active users are in North America. But the company earmarked 87 percent of its global budget for classifying misinformation for the U.S., according to one document.
In a report produced after the elections, Facebook found that over 40 percent of top impressions in the Indian state of West Bengal were “fake/inauthentic.”
Human rights activists and politicians have long accused Facebook of moving into countries without fully understanding its potential impact. In India, a lack of expertise in the nation’s 22 officially recognized languages hampered the company.
