Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta had approved anti-Muslim political advertising that included hate speech and violence during the Indian General election, a report released on Monday revealed.
The investigation by ICWI (India Civil Watch International) and Eko found that Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta, have allowed Artificial Intelligence to manipulate political ads containing disinformation and religious violence towards Muslims.
The report further said Meta’s system has completely failed to differentiate between harmful, fake, and violent ads.
The ads submitted in the Meta’s ad library contained hate speech towards Muslims living in India. All of these ads belong to the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party), which has a history of inciting hatred towards Muslims. The current party leader, PM Modi, who is also the sitting prime minister of India has publically called Muslims “Infiltrators“.
As per the report, the adverts were created based on misinformation that is being spread on WhatsApp groups, which a famous YouTuber Dhruv Rathee mentioned in one of his videos.
Meta has approved ads in English, Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, and Gujarati, according to the report, even if some ads are rejected by their system, with a few tweaks, you can get them online, no matter what it contains.
Meta which had pledged to prevent AI-generated manipulative content has failed to do a basic fact check for their ad system.
Meta required approval for running political ads, but a lot of accounts have been running such ads by providing fake credentials. As per the previous report of ICWI and Eko also mentioned that political parties paid a huge sum of money to buy these accounts to run political ads.
The majority of these accounts are being sold on Facebook groups having tons of members.
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