Facebook on Thursday announced it had banned BJP Telangana MLA T. Raja Singh from its Facebook and Instagram platforms for violating company policy on the promotion of “violence and hate”.

Facebook’s announcement on Singh came a day after its vice-president and managing director in India, Ajit Mohan, had deposed for over two hours before a parliamentary standing committee on the safeguarding of citizens’ rights and the misuse of social media platforms.

“We have banned Raja Singh from Facebook for violating our policy prohibiting those that promote or engage in violence and hate from having a presence on our platform,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Telegraph.

The Wall Street Journal had recently reported that Facebook’s public policy director for South and Central Asia, Ankhi Das, had opposed banning Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups for hate posts, citing the company’s business interests in India.

On Thursday, WSJ reported on its website that five accounts on Facebook in Singh’s name and one on Instagram — the photo and video-sharing platform owned by Facebook — had been disabled.

Singh, whose Twitter background is a banner calling for the establishment of a “Hindu Rashtra”, tweeted: “I’d like to clarify that I’ve not been using FB since April 2019. So, banning me makes no sense.”

He suggested that the pages Facebook had now banned may have been created by his followers, PTI reported.

It quoted Singh as saying he had written to Hyderabad’s cyber police on October 8, 2018, that his official Facebook page had been hacked, and that a new page he had started “was unpublished/deleted in April 2019”.

Singh said he would write to Facebook to reopen his official account. “I will follow all rules and regulations.... I should be given the right to use a Facebook account and I will seek their permission,” PTI quoted him as saying.

In a video message, Singh alleged that Rahul Gandhi had made false statements on social media against the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and demanded that accounts of the Congress and the AIMIM party be deleted, the PTI report added.

Facebook did not respond to queries on which accounts of Singh had been disabled and when; nor did it explain the delayed action against him.

Time magazine had reported last week that Shivnath Thukral, a Facebook public policy executive whose role entails both enforcing the rules on hate speech and lobbying with governments, had gone slow on acting against another BJP politician, Assam MLA Shiladitya Dev, for his hate posts.

Das, Thukral and Mohan have not responded to queries from this newspaper since the controversy broke out.

Both WSJ and Time have reported that Das and Thukral have ties with the BJP, although Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad complained to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week that Facebook India officials were biased against his party.

Response to Cong

Facebook has responded to the Congress’s complaints of bias and collusion with the BJP, promising corrective measures, a non-partisan attitude and willingness to engage with the party on these concerns, the Opposition party said.

The Congress had accused Facebook and WhatsApp of interfering in India’s electoral process and helping the BJP spread hate, and demanded a criminal investigation and a joint parliamentary committee probe.

It had written two letters to Zuckerberg on the activities of his company’s India team and threatened legal action if corrective measures were not taken.

“We have today received a response from Facebook Inc. Facebook has thanked the Congress party for raising this concern and acknowledged its seriousness while not refuting any of the charges made against individuals of the Facebook India leadership team in the media articles,” Congress data analytics chief Praveen Chakravarty said on Thursday.

“They have also expressed their desire to be non-partisan and continue to engage with the Congress party on these matters.”

Chakravarty added: “The party will await further concrete action from the global leadership of Facebook and demonstration of specific corrective measures being undertaken in Facebook and WhatsApp India.”

Sources said the decision to ban Singh came after an extensive process that the company follows in deciding which individuals meet the criteria for policy violation, and that a review of Singh’s actions had been going on for some time, PTI reported.

Facebook had previously removed content Singh had posted for violating its policies, but the decision to ban him from the platform had been taken now, one of the sources said.

Singh has been brought under Facebook’s policy relating to dangerous individuals and organisations, the PTI report said.

He will not be allowed on Facebook or Instagram, and the company will remove pages, groups and accounts set up to represent him, it added.

However, Facebook will continue to allow a wider discussion of him, including praise and support, the report said.