Two Rohingya refugees in India have filed a public interest litigation [PIL] case with the Delhi High Court seeking its intervention in curbing anti-Rohingya hate content on Facebook, and now members of the community have said that India’s social media users have called them “terrorists,” “jihadists” and “illegal immigrants,” among other derogatory terms, and sought their expulsion from the country.
The petition became public last week, and it calls for India’s regulators to monitor Facebook and remove “hate speech and harmful content that originates in India from its platform and is directed toward the Rohingya community.”
“Both the internal documents from Facebook and external reports available have repeatedly shown that misinformation, fake news, hate speech and politically divisive content [on the platform, directed against the Rohingya community] have resulted in real-world violence, both in India and abroad,” the petition reads.
On Tuesday, as the case came up for hearing, Colin Gonsalves, a counsel representing the Rohingya petitioners, said that an “ecosystem” of the platform “magnified hate speech through its algorithm” to enhance its business.
“The platform was a propagator of hateful content targeting the Rohingya community, he said … Hate speech is active propaganda,” Gonsalves said.
Arvind Datar, appearing before the court for Facebook, opposed the petition and asserted the platform already had done a substantial amount of work to prevent its abuse, following consultations with the federal government.
“The offending posts that the PIL mentions have already been taken down [by the Facebook authority],” Datar said.
“They are saying we are propagating hate. This is not true.”
Fleeing violence and persecution in Buddhist majority Myanmar, the Muslim Rohingya for decades had been crossing over to neighboring Bangladesh and other countries, including India.
Although India views all Rohingya refugees as “illegal immigrants” — having not signed the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention — the community mostly lived peacefully in the country for decades.
