Yael Eisenstat:
So that’s another interesting case. I actually traveled with the Facebook research team to India in 2018.
And if you note, a lot of the documents are talking about 2019 on. And a lot of the Facebook P.R. statements now are talking about 2019 on. When we were there in 2018, we met with lots of people who showed us without question about troll farms and fake engagement and hatred spreading. And they were imploring us to do something about it.
And our research team came back and put forward their recommendations. And so to say that they didn’t know these things were happening is blatantly untrue. But, as the documents now prove to us, again, they were making political decisions to protect their relationship with the party in power in India. And those political decisions were part of the reasons they didn’t enforce some of their very own policies that could have possibly helped tamp down some of the just misinformation and hatred that spreads in India.
And just one more quick point. Another thing that we learned in the document is that they only spent 80 percent of their budget for classifying misinformation; 87 percent of that is spent in the U.S., as opposed to anywhere else in the world, and the U.S. only represents 10 percent of their user base.
