“Preachers of Hate: Documenting Hate Speech on Facebook India”, 15 July 2022

With almost 350 million users, India is Facebook's largest user market. Yet, Meta has blatantly failed to address hate content and hateful actors targeting religious minorities in India.

In this report, we show that extensive fan page networks are using Facebook to widely amplify hate speech and calls to violence and genocide against Indian Muslims.

As part of our ongoing research on Meta, we are monitoring 634 pages, grouped into lists by type. For the purpose of this report, we focus on three of the lists that we curated, which as of April 2022 contained a total of 155 pages. Given Meta’s exemption to political hate speech, we focus on the fan page network supporting Yati Narsinghanand, Suresh Chavhanke (and Sudarshan News Network) and Pushpendra Kulshrestha. We selected these actors due to ongoing controversies involving hate speech.

By providing social, religious and political context to Facebook posts, we show that these fan pages are used as tools in an unprecedented manner to inciting violence and rallying vigilante mobs. The prolonged presence of both the actors and their fan clubs on Facebook underscores Meta’s inability to regulate its platforms even in the face of an impending genocide.

A business-as-usual scenario without effective content moderation on Meta’s platform such as Facebook has serious human rights implications for Indian minorities, and for India as a democracy.