Hyderabad: Raja Singh, the only BJP MLA from Hyderabad and Telangana has denied the claims that he makes communally loaded posts online, asserting he only works in the national interest.

He said his official FB page had been “hacked and blocked” in 2018.

A top Facebook India official turned a blind eye to hate speech by a BJP leader and three other “Hindu nationalist individuals and groups” to avoid damaging the social media platform’s business prospects, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide with Indian Politics

In Facebook posts and public appearances, Indian politician T. Raja Singh has said Rohingya Muslim immigrants should be shot, called Muslims traitors, and threatened to raze mosques.

Facebook Inc. employees charged with policing the platform were watching. By March of this year, they concluded Mr. Singh not only had violated the company’s hate-speech rules but qualified as dangerous, a designation that takes into account a person’s off-platform activities, according to current and former Facebook employees familiar with the…

The WSJ  reported that considering business priorities, Facebook’s top public policy executive in India, Ankhi Das, is “opposed applying hate-speech rules” to at least four individuals and groups linked with the BJP despite the fact that they were “flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence.”

Das, the public policy director of Facebook’s India, South and Central Asia division since 2011, has the task of overseeing “a team that decides what content is allowed on the platform”,

The WSJ the report mentioned a hate speech — calling for violence against the minorities by Telangana BJP MLA T Raja Singh, in the Telangana Assembly who has made communally provocative statements. “The current and former Facebook employees said Das’ intervention on behalf of Singh is part of a broader pattern of favoritism by Facebook toward Mr. Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party and Hindu hard-liners,” as per the WSJ report.