Facebook on Monday announced suspension of 700 political pages, where the majority were linked to the opposition party, the Congress. However, 15 pages were also were associated with prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Unofficial reports, say that the ruling BJP party lost over 200 pro-BJP pages, which facebook still had to clarify.
Even though the count of the pro-Congress pages removed were many folds higher than BJP, Facebook’s actions affected BJP more. The pro-Congress pages had close to 206,000 followers, while pro-BJP pages had 2,600,000 followers. There is a ten fold difference in reach between the Congress and BJP.
These multiple pro-Congress pages, ran like micro-blogs had a small reach. The party, came out to clarify that none of their official pages were withdrawn. Most of the Congress pages were associated with the Gujarat Congress IT Cell.
Where as BJP, had a third company Silver Touch who ran these pages. A Facebook page called, The India Eye had over 2.1 million followers. It was the default news feed page in the Namo apps as well. The BJP while talking to the Reuters, distanced itself from Silver Touch.
Facebook pages that were associated to Instagram were also suspended.
Soon after the pro-rightwing pages were removed, admins took to twitter to voice against Facebook’s actions. However, they soon deleted their tweets.
Both Dainik Bharat and Postcard News are also gone. pic.twitter.com/mzPt9X5WMe
— Pratik Sinha (@free_thinker) April 1, 2019
Facebook page of @MyNation is down.https://t.co/NbR8hBW0ef pic.twitter.com/0Cnkb67Fry
— Pratik Sinha (@free_thinker) April 1, 2019
More.. pic.twitter.com/trlcgWZcI9
— Pratik Sinha (@free_thinker) April 1, 2019