'Facebook policies clear, articulate in limiting hate speech, violence'

These statements come one year after Facebook's former Public Policy Director Ankhi Das quit amid a controversy

Facebook's hate-speech policies are objective, the chief of the company's India operations told NDTV in an interview.

"When it comes to limiting hate speech or speech calling for violence, we are pretty clear and we are transparent in articulating our community guidelines on what is allowed on our platforms and what is not," Ajit Mohan, Facebook Vice President and India Managing Director, told the publication.

These statements come one year after Facebook's former Public Policy Director Ankhi Das quit amid controversy over giving a BJP leader a free pass who had been accused of hate speech. The Wall Street Journal released a report, following which she quit, and the leader was banned by Facebook a few weeks later.

Ajit Mohan refuted claims that the report influenced Facebook's decision.

"In a world where conversations that are in progress get exposed, it's easy to assume that something happened because of internal conversations being leaked. But I disagree with [the suggestion that doing what is right is not Facebook's best interests]," he said.

Speaking about the new IT Rules in the country, he said that social media giant has welcomed the rules.

"Across our family of apps, we have made it clear that we respect Indian law. And we signaled that when the rules came, we were going to try and comply. Except for the one area around traceability on WhatsApp and even there what we have done is use the legal framework in India to ask the courts the question in terms of what is the implication of traceability and we clearly have a disagreement there," he added.

He said that despite disagreements, WhatsApp has also complied with many of the rules while awaiting clarification on the rules of encryption and privacy from courts.