Assam hate cloud on Facebook

Facebook is failing to rein in a “tsunami” of hate posts inflaming ethnic tensions in Assam, campaign group Avaaz has said, with content about “criminals”, “rapists”, “terrorists” and “dogs” shared almost 100,000 times.

Avaaz said the dehumanising language — often targeting Bengali Muslims — was similar to that used on Facebook about Myanmar’s Rohingya before an army crackdown and ethnic violence forced 700,000 Rohingya to flee in 2017 to Bangladesh.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company was proactively removing 65 per cent of hate speech before it was reported globally, and that its content reviewers, working in at least nine Indian languages, were rigorously trained to “catch harmful content”.