Delhi HC reserves order on plea moved by Rohingya refugees for removal of hateful content from Facebook

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Tuesday reserved the order on a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) moved by two Rohingya refugees and sought direction from Facebook India and the Centre to monitor and promptly suspend or remove hate speech and harmful content that originates in India from its platform.
The bench of Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora, after hearing the arguments at length from both sides, reserved the order.
Appearing for Facebook India, Senior Advocate Arvind Datar submitted that it has put in place measures like community standards, third-party fact-checkers, reporting tools, and artificial intelligence to detect and prevent the spread of inappropriate or objectionable content like hate speech and harmful content.
Plea stated that the presence of Rohingya refugees in India is a highly politicised matter, and as such, they are disproportionately targeted with harmful content on Facebook, painting the group as a threat to India, often referring to the group as "terrorists," "infiltrators," and exaggerating the numbers of Rohingya that have fled to India.
Plea has been moved through Advocate Kawalpreet Kaur, who stated that the Rohingyas in India live in squalid camps without access to schools, medical facilities, or regular work. There is neither potable water nor a constant supply of water.
The plots do not have any proper washrooms for defecation. The Rohingyas do live under constructions of bamboo and tarpaulin.
Besides this, the Rohingyas are under constant threat, sometimes physical threats where their slums are set on fire and they become subject to physical violence, plea stated.
Petitioners represented by Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves submitted that this type of harmful content, painting the Rohingya as a threat that needs to be removed from India, is strikingly similar to the type of content that proliferated on Facebook prior to the 2017 clearance operations against the Rohingya, causing grave concerns for the safety of Rohingyas in India.
In fact, after this false political propaganda was disseminated, there were numerous attacks on Rohingyas in different parts of India. Rohingya slum settlements were burned in many places and the Rohingyas were rendered destitute, stated the plea.
The stateless Muslim Rohingya minority, having fled ethnic cleansing operations in Myanmar in 2017, is particularly vulnerable in India and Bangladesh.
Bangladesh currently hosts 1 million Rohingya refugees in congested refugee camps located in Cox's Bazar on the border with Myanmar.
The UNHCR reported that India was sheltering approximately 74,600 Rohingya refugees. The "Rohingya issue" is frequently used as a political tool in both the countries and as a result, it is the subject of large amounts of harmful content on Facebook, plea read.