A day after Ankhi Das, the public policy director of Facebook for India, South and Central Asia, filed a complaint over alleged online death threats, Raipur based journalist Awesh Tiwari has filed a counter-complaint against her with Chattisgarh police.
Awesh Tiwari has lodged the complaint against the Facebook executive Ankhi Das on the late Monday evening accusing her of hurting religious sentiments and inciting communal animosity.
All the three accused are booked under Section 295a (deliberate and malicious acts that are intended to outrage religious feelings); Section 505 (1) (c) (with intent to incite, or which is likely to incite, any class or community of persons to commit any offence against any other class or community); Section 506 (criminal intimidation); Section 500 (defamation) and Section 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The allegations were framed by Tiwari after Ankhi Das named him in the FIR registered with Delhi Cyber Cell on Sunday over the alleged death threats that she has been receiving.
In her complaint, Ankhi Das has alleged that she has been facing social media abuse and receiving death threats after a Wall Street Journal report mentioning that Facebook is biased towards the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in censoring the hate speech.
WSJ’s August 14 article “Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics” has led to a huge controversy, which states that Das opposed the idea of removing incendiary posts by the BJP leaders, as she had warned that this could hurt the company’s commercial interests in India.
As per the WSJ article, Das has also revealed that she has deleted all the fake news pages connected to BJP.
Das has filed a complaint under various relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code including sexually coloured remarks, vulgar gestures through words, and criminal intimidation.
In the complaint filed by journalist Awesh Tiwari, Ram Sahu, a resident of Mungeli, Chhattisgarh, and Vivek Sinha, an Indore resident are also accused along with Ankhi Das.
“There were comments over the facts of the story, which was published in the newspaper (WSJ). I have also mentioned the role of Ankhi Das, which was there in the story. The story mentioned that Das was forcing her subordinates not to remove hate speech posts from Facebook before last year’s Lok Sabha election for political gains. She had told her subordinates that political relations with the government would be affected because of their (the posts) removal,” said Tiwari’s complaint.
