New Delhi: Congress MP Rahul Gandhi accused BJP-RSS of controlling Facebook and Whatsapp in India. The Congress party on Sunday demanded a probe by a joint- parliamentary committee in the wake of reports that the social media giants favoured BJP to further its business interest.

Rahul Gandhi slammed BJP and claimed the party had used Facebook and Whatsapp to spread fake news and hatred and to “Influence the electorate”, while Congress said the social media behemoth must institute and inquiry to protect its credibility and remove all Facebook India staffers who had any connection with the ruling party. Congress’s Chief of Data Analytics, Praveen Chakravarthy, and social media head, Rohan Gupta said they had provided “Evidence of clear bias” to Facebook senior management in India and the US, but nothing was done.

A news report by the Wall Street Journal on August 15^th said Facebook flouted its own policies on hate speech and allowed communally- sensitive content shared by BJP’s Telangana MLA T. Raja Singh to remain online because not doing so would hurt Facebook’s business interest. Referring to the report, Chakravarthy said, the content of the article was a mere conformation of what we already knew. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who heads the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, said, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology would certainly wish to hear from Facebook about the reports.