Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then his visit to Google headquarters was much talked about in mainstream and social media.
Ahead of the Townhall interaction, Mark Zuckerberg tinted his Facebook profile picture with Indian tricolour in support of Narendra Modi’s Digital India campaign. The Indian PM thanked him on his official Facebook page saying “Thanks Mark Zuckerberg for the support. I changed my DP in support of the efforts towards a Digital India.” Modi’s profile picture too was then draped in the Indian tricolour.
The new Tricolour profile picture was adopted by lakhs of Facebook users in India within hours. However a ‘tech’ website called NextBigWhat argued in a story that colouring Facebook profile pictures with the Indian tricolor to support Digital India campaign was a hidden agenda of the social networking giant to garner support for its controversial internet.org programme.
We all know the fear and frenzy created by the net neutrality debate in India and Facebook’s internet.org was at the thick of it. The US-based social networking site had partnered with telecom major Reliance Communications to offer free access to over 30 Websites without data charges to users in India – a platform that was seen as violating the principle of Net neutrality.
NextBigWhat said in the article: “For Facebook, supporting ‘Digital India’ directly translates to marketing of Internet.org in the country. This ain’t any novel initiative – a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” All hell broke lose after the article was published on the website.
Catch News called the NextBigWhat piece “an eye opening investigation” and based its own story on it with a title: “Does Modi know of Zuckerberg’s trick behind the tricolour Facebook profile picture?”
It reproduced the ‘source code’ of Facebook’s Support Digital India page from the NextBigWhat article which seemed the only ‘document’ to corroborate their claim.
MenXP, an Indian lifestyle website, which belongs to Times Internet group did the same thing in an article “Your Facebook Tricolor Profile Picture Doesn’t Support Digital India; Here’s The Ugly Truth.”
Other smaller websites followed suit and now this erroneous report is being widely circulated on social media with netizens venting their anger against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Now, about the Support Digital India Source Code that has the word “_internetOrgProfilePicture_” in it. If one visits Facebook.com/supportdigitalindia page and inspects the Page element, it shows Class=“_internetOrgProfilePicture_” among numerous other things. Now, this is just a CSS Class name as the code itself mentions. And anyone with basic knowledge of CSS or HTML or website building will know that a Class name is just a Shorthand name that developers choose. This in no way can register support for internet.org as the flawed articles claim.
The articles presumed that just mention of the words InternetOrg in Source Code of Support Digital India page meant Facebook was deceiving Indian people into supporting its controversial project while in reality this was not the case.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg too has a tricolor draped profile picture and said in an update: “I changed my profile picture to support Digital India, the Indian government’s effort to connect rural communities to the internet and give people access to more services online. Looking forward to discussing this with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Facebook today.” It is therefore unlikely that this move by the head of a multi-national corporation is to deceive Indian people and Prime Minister Modi.
It must be recalled that Facebook has already made its submission in support of its internet.org project to India’s Department of Telecommunications over a month ago. And changing profile pictures does not amount to “supporting Facebook’s initiatives and in the process, stifling innovation in the country,” as one report puts it.
If Facebook were to trick us into taking our digital consent for its internet.org, it could quietly do it when we just signed into our accounts rather than when we changed our DPs to support Digital India.
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