Facebook has allowed a network of fake accounts to artificially inflate the popularity of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP in India, after he was warned months ago.
The company was preparing to remove the fake accounts, but stopped when it found evidence that the politician was probably directly involved in the network, according to internal documents seen by the Guardian.
The company’s decision not to take timely action against the network, which he says is already violating its policies, is just the latest example of Facebook keeping the powerful at lower standards than regular users.
“It’s not fair to have one legal system for the rich and important and one for everyone else, but that’s essentially the route Facebook has devised,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook scientist, who denounced the fake network discovered, said. Zhang came forward to expose the company’s failure to address how the platform is used to manipulate political discourse around the world.
Facebook’s failure to act against the MPs will also raise questions about Facebook’s relationship with the Hindu nationalist party. Facebook has repeatedly treated the transgressions of BJP leaders with unnecessary indulgence, the Wall Street Journal reported in August 2020.
Since Narendra Modi and the BJP harnessed the power of Facebook and took power in India’s general election in 2014, deceptive social media tactics have become commonplace in Indian politics, according to local experts.
“Politicians in India are at the door when it comes to using these manipulative techniques, and this use of social media for political means is therefore only to be expected,” said Nikhil Pahwa, an Indian digital rights activist and founder of MediaNama , said. “It’s an arms race between social media platforms and those who engage in dishonest behavior.”
All the major political parties in India benefit from deceptive techniques to obtain false preferences, comments, shares or supporters, Zhang found. Prior to the 2019 general election in India, she worked for a massive removal of low-quality false involvement on political pages in all parties.
In December 2019, Zhang detected four sophisticated networks of suspicious accounts generating false involvement – i.e. likes, shares, comments and reactions – on the pages of major Indian politicians. Two of the networks are dedicated to supporting members of the BJP, including the MP; the other two support members of the Indian National Congress, the leading opposition party.
An investigator from the threat intelligence team of Facebook has determined that the networks consist of clumsy accounts that are manually controlled and used to create false involvement. They have not risen to the level of ‘coordinated misconduct’ – the term Facebook applies to the most serious deceptive tactics on its platform, such as the Russian influence operation that interfered in the US election in 2016 – but they still violate the rules of the platform.
The investigator recommended that the accounts be sent through a “checkpoint” – a process by which suspicious accounts are closed unless and until the account owner can provide proof of their identity. Checkpoints are a common enforcement mechanism for Facebook, which enables users to have only one account under the “real” name of the user.
On December 19, a Facebook staff linked more than 500 accounts linked to three of the networks. On December 20, the same staff member was preparing to check the approximately 50 accounts involved in the fourth network when he stopped.
“Just want to confirm that we’re comfortable playing on the actors,” he wrote in Facebook’s task management system. One of the accounts was marked by Facebook’s “Xcheck” system as a “government partner” and “high priority – Indian”, he noted. The system is used to flag prominent accounts and release certain automated enforcement actions.
Zhang realizes that it was the member of the MP and that it was included in the network, strong evidence that the MP or someone with access to his Facebook account was involved in coordinating the 50 fake accounts. (The Guardian is aware of the MP’s identity, but prefers not to disclose it, as the evidence of his involvement in the network is not definitive. The MP’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
Political ambitions may explain why an MP would try to get fake likes on his Facebook posts.
“The value of a politician is now determined by his followers on social media, with Modi as the leader among most world leaders,” said Srinivas Kodali, a researcher at the Free Software Movement India. “Popularity on social media does not directly help to gain power, but it has become a way to enter politics and rise in the ranks.
Task management documents show that Zhang repeatedly sought approval to proceed with the checkpoints. ‘For completeness and [to] to avoid accusations of biased enforcement, could we also come to an assessment of the group acting? [the MP]? She wrote on 3 February. No one answered.
On August 7, she notes the still unresolved situation and writes: ‘Given the close ties with a sitting member of the Lok Sabha, we approved our policy for a removal we did not receive; and the situation is not seen as a focal point for prioritization. “Again, there was no response.
And on her last day on Facebook in September 2020, she updated the task one last time to indicate that there was an ‘still existing group of accounts’ to the MP.
“I asked about it repeatedly, and I don’t think I ever got a response,” Zhang said. “It seemed rather worrying to me, because the fact that I caught a politician or someone associated with him in the act was rather a reason to act, not less.”
Facebook provided Guardian with several conflicting reports about the handling of the MP’s network. The company initially denied that the action on the network was blocked, saying that the “vast majority” accounts were checked and permanently removed in December 2019 and early 2020.
After the Guardian pointed to documents showing that the checkpoints had not been carried out, Facebook said that part of the group was eliminated in May 2020 and that it was continuing the rest of the network accounts. It is later said that a ‘specialist team’ checked the accounts and that a small minority of them did not reach the threshold for removal, but were not active.
The company did not respond to questions about why the accounts were not checked in December, when the investigator recommended enforcement for the first time. It also did not respond to questions about which specialist team was involved in the May review of the accounts, nor why this review and application was not recorded in the task management system. It claims that the policy team was not responsible for blocking any action.
A Facebook spokesperson, Liz Bourgeois, said: ‘We fundamentally disagree with Ms Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and efforts to eradicate abuse on our platform. We are aggressively going after abuses around the world and have specialized teams focusing on this work. Over the years, our teams have investigated and publicly shared our findings on three CIB removals in India. We have also constantly detected and acted against spam and false involvement in the region, in line with our policies. ”
While Zhang was trying to persuade Facebook to act in the MP’s network, Facebook staff repeatedly took action against one of the two Indian national congressional networks they tried to remove in December. Although the checkpoints removed most of the fake accounts, Facebook made immediate efforts to recover with new accounts, and in the weeks leading up to the 2020 state election in Delhi, the network that had previously strengthened a congressional politician in Punjab has, AAP started supporting, the anti-corruption party in Delhi.
In the comments of posts of BJP politicians in Delhi, the fake bills presented themselves as supporters of Modi who nevertheless chose to vote for AAP during the state election. The intervention was possibly the result of political actors trying to support the party in Delhi with the best chance of defeating the BJP, as Congress enjoys little support in local politics in Delhi. Facebook has undertaken several checkpoints to shut down the network.
The case of the MP was not the first time that the lower standards of Facebook towards politicians who violate the rules against improper conduct have caused concern among some staff. ‘When people begin to realize that we are making an exception on page administrators of presidents or political parties, these operators can eventually work it out and deliberately [coordinated inauthentic behavior] from more official channels, ”a researcher told Zhang during a conversation in June 2019 about the company’s unwillingness to take action against a network of fake accounts and Pages that reinforces the president of Honduras.
The issue is particularly sensitive in India, where Facebook has come under fire from opposition politicians for allowing BJP politicians to break its rules, especially with regard to anti-Muslim hate speech.
Facebook’s head of public policy for India, Ankhi Das, has dominated policy makers who have ruled that BJP politician T Raja Singh should be named a ‘dangerous individual’ – the classification for hate group leaders – over his anti-Muslim incitement, according to a Wall Street Journal report of August 2020. Das resigned following the Journal’s reporting on her open support for Modi’s 2014 campaign. Facebook denies any prejudice or misconduct.