New Delhi, Oct 27 (UNI) Facebook Inc's public policy director for India, South and Central Asia, Ankhi Das, has stepped down, the social media giant said in a statement on Tuesday.
"Ankhi has decided to step down from her role in Facebook to pursue her interest in public service. Ankhi was one of our earliest employees in India and played an instrumental role in the growth of the company and its services over the last 9 years," Facebook India's Managing Director Ajith Mohan, said in a statement.
The resignation comes weeks after Ms Das got caught up in a controversy speculating the social media giant's role in monitoring and regulating political content on its platform that is used by over 300 million users in India out of its global statistic of 2.45 billion users.
Articles published by The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, in the month of August, alleged Facebook of not having uniform rules for hate speeches on its platform.
The WSJ report read that the Facebook Inc executive made internal postings over several years detailing her support for ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and disparaging its main rival.
It was seen conflicting with the company’s pledge to remain neutral in elections around the world.Two of Ms Das's messages, posted the day before Narendra Modi swept to victory in India’s 2014 national elections, were quoted by WSJ that read: “We lit a fire to his social media campaign and the rest is of course history.”
“It’s taken thirty years of grassroots work to rid India of state socialism finally,” Ms Das wrote in a separate post on the defeat of the Indian National Congress party, praising Mr Modi as the “strongman” who had broken the former ruling party’s hold.
But after the reports from the WSJ and Time, she received flak, forcing her to file an FIR with Delhi Police. In her complaint and statement to the police, she had identified several social media accounts for issuing threats and posting offensive messages.
Delhi Police had written to Facebook and Twitter seeking details of the accused mentioned by the public policy director.
Facebook, which is at the center of political storm, has stood to its stand that it applied hate speech rules uniformly without any consideration to the political parties that may be involved and that the posts by Ms Das do not show inappropriate bias.
As more and more political rivals got involved in the matter, the social media giant was called up before a Parliamentary Panel chaired by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor. However, instead of Ms Ankhi, Mr Mohan showed up.
It was not until last week that Ms Das appeared before a Joint Committee of Parliament where she was grilled about political content on the social media platform as well as Facebook's stand on data protection bill for almost two hours.
In the meeting, Facebook was told that the social media platform should not draw inferences from the data of its users for the commercial benefit of its advertisers or for electoral purposes.
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