Meta response to BHRRC; 13 May 2024

Upon receiving the report “Slander, Lies, and Incitement: India’s million-dollar election meme network,” any actionable content that it contained was escalated to the relevant internal teams for review and appropriate action. Specifically:

● We took action against the Ulta Chashma and Meme Express pages and the violating ads on them.

● We took action against 14 accounts and admins, which can no longer run ads without fulfilling additional identification requirements.

● Enforcement action was taken in relation to a number of other pages, as well as an ad disclaimer, as per our policy.

● We reviewed the 38 ads in the report and found that the content did not violate our Advertising Standards.

In addition, we would like to draw your attention to some other relevant information:

● Details about the preparations that we have made in the run up to elections in India can be found here.

● Our authorization process and requirements for advertisers who want to create or edit ads about social issues, elections or politics in India can be found here.

● Our monthly India transparency report contains detail on content actioned and the proactive detection rate across multiple policy areas, including hate speech.

● Regarding language coverage, we moderate content in 2o Indian languages, and our network of third party fact checkers covers 16 Indian languages plus English.

● The Election Commission of India has access to a high priority channel to flag content that may be in violation of election laws, and we take down ads escalated to us by the Commission during silence periods.