Twitter Red Flags BJP Leader’s Three-Year-Old Hate Post

Two weeks after Facebook India banned Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Telangana T Raja Singh, social media platform Twitter has red flagged a  three-year-old tweet post by him for violating its hateful conduct policy.  

In that post, the MLA had urged Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and other citizens to act against Rohingya refugees in India and called them as those “who supported terrorism.”  

Singh is known for posting hate messages and delivering public speeches loaded with hate against a particular community. Social media giant Facebook, which banned him, was criticised for acting against Singh only after a Wall Street Journal report in August raised critical questions of Facebook’s neutrality. 

Even Ankhi Das, director of Public Policy for Facebook India, South and Central Asia, was forced to apologise to Muslim employees in the company at a town hall meeting for a post last year which labelled Muslims as a “degenerate community”. 

A Twitter spokesperson told Techcrunch, which had raised the issue, in a statement to that Singh’s tweet was “actioned” for violating its hateful conduct policy.

“Twitter has zero-tolerance policies in place to address threats of violence, abuse and harassment, and hateful conduct. If we identify accounts that violate these rules, we’ll take enforcement action,” the spokesperson added.

Monitoring Hate

Between July-December 2019, Twitter received a total of 782 legal content removal requests from India during the period under review. Worldwide, the social media giant received around 27,538 legal content removal requests and its compliance rate was 34.7%.

Twitter said it saw a 50% increase in content removed compared to the last reporting period and a 27% increase in accounts suspended. Twitter said it saw a 47% increase in accounts actioned compared to the last reporting period.

The platform said it removed 2.9 Mn pieces of content and suspended around 8.72 lakh accounts during the period under review. “There was a 54% increase in the number of accounts actioned for violations of our hateful conduct policy during the reporting period,” Twitter said in the report. There was a 95% increase in the number of accounts actioned for violations of Twitter’s abuse policy according to the report.

In December 2018, MeitY had proposed amendments to the IT Act in December 2018 where it aims to curb the misuse of social media platforms and the spread of fake news. The draft also proposed that the intermediary will have to deploy technology-based automated tools for proactively identifying and removing or disabling public access to unlawful information or content