-The Telegraph Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, recently told the US Congress that the social media giant 'promotes global division and ethnic violence', including in India The disclosures of Frances Haugen, who hit the headlines across the world earlier this week as “the Facebook whistleblower”, include multiple references to the promotion of divisions and ethnic violence in India. Her main claims on Facebook’s work in India are that pages associated with the...

-TheWire.in "Such mass targeting of Muslim women in public spaces, whether online or offline, that treats them as objects in the political discourse of Hindutva is simply unacceptable." New Delhi: A group of more than 800 women’s rights organisations and concerned individuals have issued a statement condemning the recent online targeting and harassment of Muslim women on GitHub, through an app called ‘Sulli Deals’ that sought to ‘auction’ these women. Photos of over...

-ThePrint.in More than the Pakistani ISI’s PR wing or the Congress’ Gujarat IT cell, the BJP has been affected by Monday’s takedown. New Delhi: Facebook Monday removed around 200 pro-BJP pages or groups as part of a larger purge of political pages that violate its policies, ThePrint has reliably learnt from multiple sources. The social network announced that it had taken down various political pages run by different organisations: A digital marketing company...

-The Telegraph The impact the beast called social media can really have on the ensuing general elections Sometime in the late 2000s, a young software engineer who voluntarily ran social media propaganda for the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party got an opportunity to attend a BJP social media meet in Bangalore. Among the people who saw this young man speak there was the then Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi....

Good news about digital inclusion often leaves little room for reporting on bad experiences, which netizens encounter in the digital world. A recent report by LIRNEAsia – an ICT [information and communication technology] policy and regulation think tank working in the Asia-Pacific – says that almost one among five Indian netizens in the age-group 15-65 years had faced online harassment in 2017. In contrast, roughly twelve out of hundred internet...