Facebook grapples with Indian hate army

On February 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala.

For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.

The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.

“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.