Trinamool Party MP Derek O'Brien has written a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, complaining of bias in Facebook
Bengaluru: After Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad wrote a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, apprising him of the bias and questioning the credibility of fact-checkers, now the Trinamool Congress has written to raising the issue of alleged bias of the social media giant towards the BJP and claimed that there is enough evidence in the public domain to substantiate this charge. Party MP Derek O'Brien, who has written the letter to Zuckerberg also makes a reference to an earlier meeting between the two, where some of these concerns were raised. Sources in the party said that O'Brien met Zuckerberg in October 2015 in Delhi.
"We, the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC), India's second-largest opposition party, have had serious concerns about Facebook's role during the 2014 and 2019 general elections in India," O'Brien wrote in the letter accessed by PTI.
"With the elections in the Indian state of West Bengal just months away, your company's recent blocking of Facebook pages and accounts in Bengal also points to the link between Facebook and the BJP. There is enough material now in the public domain, including internal memos of senior Facebook management, to substantiate the bias," he wrote.
On the other hand, Ravi Shankar Prasad had rued how there is apparent bias in the entire system.
“It seems from credible media reports that Facebook India team, right from the India Managing Director to other senior officials, is dominated by people who belong to a particular political belief. People from this political predisposition have been overwhelmingly defeated by the people of in successive free and fair elections. After having lost all democratic legitimacy, they are trying to discredit India’s democratic process by dominating the decision-making apparatus of important social media platforms. Facebook is the latest tool in their arsenal to stoke internal divisions and social disturbances.”
He added, “It is problematic when Facebook employees are on record abusing the Prime Minister and senior Cabinet Ministers of India while still working in Facebook India and managing important positions. It is doubly problematic when the bias of individuals becomes an inherent bias of the platform. And it is unacceptable when political biases of individuals impinge on the freedom of speech of millions of people.”
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