Big Tech’s Role in Spreading Hate Speech in India Is a Lesson for the World

Countries across the world, especially ones that are currently not ruled by despotic regimes, would do well to advocate and bargain for more stringent measures to be adopted by Big Tech companies in regulating such hateful content on their platforms. Studying these myriad ways in which social media platforms amplify anti-minority hate speeches and content depicting, inciting, and celebrating violence in India can be instrumental in understanding the dangers posed globally by this phenomenon.

This is especially crucial at a time when Meta says they are drastically reducing content restrictions on their platforms, as part of a series of moves designed to curry favour with Donald Trump.

And X under Elon Musk consistently allows hateful content on its platform, with the owner-billionaire and member of the Trump administration routinely sharing hateful posts himself, not just on matters involving the United States but elsewhere too, including countries in Europe.

Importantly enough, there are precedents to show that when social media giants try to combat the spread of a particular online phenomenon, there have been varying degrees of success achieved.

For example, after facing mounting pressure to act against the rapid rise of QAnon groups in the United States on their platform, Facebook had announced in August 2020 that they had “removed over 790 groups, 100 Pages and 1,500 ads tied to QAnon from Facebook, blocked over 300 hashtags across Facebook and Instagram, and additionally imposed restrictions on over 1,950 Groups and 440 Pages on Facebook and over 10,000 accounts on Instagram.”

was a collection of false conspiracy theories revolving around a core falsehood that a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control American politics and media. In May 2019, the FBI had QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat. Some QAnon followers had reportedly even committed acts of violence inspired by the theory, including attempted arson.

After Facebook’s actions in August 2020 however, traffic for QAnon phrases and hashtags fell drastically on the platform. It wasn’t a complete win though — Vox that “around the same time, membership in groups posing as anti-child trafficking groups exploded, and in those groups, users were still largely spreading QAnon content.”

But one could argue that it made the job of spreading QAnon a few steps harder, and the pipeline to become a QAnon member less easily accessible.

The systemic rot of hateful content in India today could replicate itself elsewhere tomorrow, in countries that aren’t impacted by this phenomenon at anywhere near the scale that India is currently.

To prevent such a situation, knowing that social media companies adopt different guises for different geographies, we must closely look at the regions and contexts where these Big Tech companies are on their worst behaviour, and better learn how to counter them.