38 CSOs urge Meta to implement election and human rights safeguarding recommendations ahead of Indian Elections
"Enforce the political advertising silence period and take comprehensive measures to uphold human rights during India’s elections", 10 April 2024
Dear Mr Zuckerberg,
As elections approach in the world’s largest democracy, we, members of the Indian diaspora and allies from around the world, are writing to address pressing issues concerning Meta’s involvement in electoral processes and associated human rights violations in India. We call on Meta to take action to uphold integrity of electoral processes and democratic principles in India, and to review its operational policies to ensure neutrality and transparency during election periods.
...To this end, we are jointly sending you a 10-point-plan attached to this letter, which contains measures tailored to the Indian context that you must urgently implement on your platforms to comply with your obligations to address your adverse human rights impact. We especially call on Meta to reinforce the Election Commission of India's requirement for a forty-eight-hour silence period for political advertising before each election phase.
Specifically, we call on Meta to take urgent measures to implement the following 10- point-plan for India’s 2024 elections:
- Adopt an election silence period...
- Ensure transparency by vetting who they are receiving money from...
- Ban shadow advertisers...
- Ensure that fact-checkers in India can label misinformative and disinformative advertisements...
- Ensure fact-checked information is correctly labelled and/or removed in all languages...
- Ensure that dehumanizing, caricaturing, demonizing of women and minorities in India is checked and restricted in line with the platform’s hate speech policy...
- Proactively act to restrict re-spawning disinformation and hate speech pages and profiles...
- Remove the political exemption on hate speech and viral disinformation...
- Allocate resources proportionately to the risk of harm to users ...
- Shut down the recommender system and make your algorithms open for public audits by civil societies and academia...