Facebook whistleblowers Sophie Zhang and Frances Haugen on Wednesday joined a collective of advocacy groups to press Facebook to release its India Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) and address allegations the company is not doing enough to stop human rights abuses in India.
At a press conference, Zhang and Haugen, said the social media company was not able to contain hate speech and misinformation. The groups identified themselves as India Civil Watch International (ICWI) and the Real Facebook Oversight Board.
“If Facebook was required to publish the performance of its Hindi language violence incitement hate speech classifiers, it would show that India does not get the safety it deserves” for its “300 million users”, said Haugen, a former product manager on the Civic Misinformation team at Facebook.
She added that for a linguistically diverse country like India, Facebook needs to organize safety mechanisms to protect its users on the app.
Zhang, the company’s former data scientist, said:“Facebook claims benevolence, but in the end, they feel no responsibility to protect democracy… At Facebook, the policy department- the people responsible for making decisions- are the same as the ones responsible for lobbying the government. So, it’s no surprise that there is a conflict of interest.”
“Given the complexity of this work, we want these assessments to be thorough. We will report annually on how we’re addressing human rights impacts, in line with our Human Rights Policy,” said Miranda Sissons, director of Human Rights Policy, Meta. Facebook, the parent company of the social media network, was rebranded as Meta recently.
{{/usCountry}}“Given the complexity of this work, we want these assessments to be thorough. We will report annually on how we’re addressing human rights impacts, in line with our Human Rights Policy,” said Miranda Sissons, director of Human Rights Policy, Meta. Facebook, the parent company of the social media network, was rebranded as Meta recently.
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