Facebook Is Intentionally Fueling Hatred, Violence For More Profits, Says Ex-Employee To Delhi Govt

On Thursday, the Delhi Legislative Assembly’s Peace and Harmony Committee examined former Facebook employee Mark S. Luckie, continuing its previous proceedings.

Extremely Scathing Revelations

The Delhi Assembly panel is conducting a hearing on the social media platform’s alleged role in fanning the February Northeast Delhi riots.

Here Mr Mark S. Luckie had actively worked with various core teams at Facebook.

The committee was chaired by AAP legislator Raghav Chadha, said that Mr. Luckie made “extremely scathing revelations” on the internal functioning of Facebook. 

Luckie said, “Facebook will tell you, they are just like the telephone… it’s not telephone or email. It actively interferes in what people see and what they don’t. It changes its algorithm, allows certain content to stay up and… be taken down. So Facebook does influence, aid a lot of this violence and misinformation to continue. Unfortunately, people are dying because of it, that… needs to be stopped,” while answering the query on Facebook’s role in abetting violence.

So far, Facebook has not commented on the subject.

Interference By Top Officials

Further, the committee said, “Mr. Luckie affirmed that there has been a repeated interference by top officials of Facebook teams, including their policy heads at the instance of the political parties upon the content moderation teams that caused eventual compromise in the execution of their own community standards,”.

According to the committee, “He has affirmed that Facebook has been creating policies with respect to efficient content moderation which are not consistent or even transparent and are developed in a manner that it suits Facebook and its business model rather than the persons who have been victimised by its inefficient policies,”.

Mr. Luckie sought to affirm that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg partakes in “various liaisons with different political parties across the globe” in order to earn “special benefits or favours”, as informed by the committee.

Bias In The Recruitment process

While talking about the recruitment process of the top heads of the company, Mr. Luckie said that for an “extremely important post such as “Public Policy Head”, persons with “cordial government relations” or having “special political affiliations” and those with “strong hold on lobbying within the government” were “preferred”, according to the Committee.

The reason behind recruiting those with “governmental influence” was because Facebook wants “an eventual and effectual change in existing laws and governmental policies” to accommodate the platform in a manner that it can “generate maximum business” said Mr. Luckie, as per the committee.

Further providing the other reason, he said that its alleged preference for “politically associated persons” as company employees was so that it could “strike a deal with the government of the country at the event of damage” used by Facebook for numerous reasons.

Moving ahead, the Committee said the he asserted that events like the Delhi communal clashes, Myanmar genocide and Sri Lanka communal violence “could have been easily averted” had Facebook acted in a “more proactive and prompt manner”.