Facebook Convinced ECI to Settle for Voluntary Code of Ethics

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Internal Facebook documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen alleged that just before the 2019 general elections in India, it managed to convince the Election Commission of India (ECI) to settle for a voluntary code of ethics and abandon its original plan of introducing strict social media regulations, Hindustan Times reported.

Such a move would help Facebook avoid additional legal obstructions.

Facebook negotiated with the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) to achieve consensus over the rules.

According to the documents, the Election Commission wanted a proper regulatory framework for the social media giant.

A spokesperson for Meta however, said that "promoting election integrity in India isn’t something we can do alone".

"Ahead of 2019 general elections, we joined other social media companies in a voluntary code of ethics for the general elections with the Election Commission of India (ECI)," the spokesperson added in an email to The Intersection and The Hindustan Times.

Facebook resisted the EC's plan to make it compulsory to disable ads during the silence period.

In fact, the EC wanted Facebook to pro-actively tell its users about the silence period and other related election rules during every round of polling.

Contrastingly, during the 2020 US elections, Facebook did not put out fresh political content for a seven-day period just before Election Day, even though there is no such thing as a silence period.

Any regulatory framework to proactively monitor and remove content would take time. The advantage that Facebook had was that the EC did not have too much time on its hands.

An amendment to the Representation of People Act, 1951 would take quite a while to pass through the Parliament, therefore making the voluntary code a better idea.

"At that stage, it was considered that an amendment would take time to process, and thus, the voluntary code was considered a better via-media," an ECI official said.

(With inputs from Hindustan Times and The Intersection)