#ResignModi Controversy: Facebook says ‘Mistake’

A couple of years ago, the US media claimed that popular social networking platform Facebook has an understanding with BJP and so is promoting religious hatred on the platform. Though Facebook denied it, time and again a few incidents get repeated that Facebook has seriously something to do with the BJP.

Well a fresh controversy has hit the headlines and Facebook in no time has started defending itself. Going into details, with the chaos of Covid-19 second wave, there is severe criticism on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi led administration. Accordingly #ResignModi hashtag has been trending for the last couple of days on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

But on Wednesday Facebook reportedly blocked posts related to the hashtag #ResignModi and hours later they were restored. With the posts getting blocked, netizens and others who have noticed it, lashed out at Facebook for being biased towards BJP especially PM Modi.

With this news getting a lot of attention Facebook was quick enough to respond and added that it barred the hashtag by mistake and not at the behest of the government. “Facebook periodically blocks hashtags for a variety of reasons, some manually but many also based on automated internal guidelines. The error stemmed from content associated with the label and not the hashtag itself,” added spokesperson of Facebook.

“We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it,” said the spokesperson further.

Surely Facebook is losing its credibility with such incidents and it has to be more proactive in trending topics and managing them.