Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
We’ve spent the past couple weeks looking at the clash of social networks and democracy in the United States. So let’s turn our attention abroad.
Assam is a state in India that is home to a large population of Bengali Muslims. The ruling party of India, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are Hindu nationalists. In August, after six years of development, the government released a controversial national register of citizens that omitted 1.9 million residents, many of them Muslim. The government has presented the project as part of an effort to expel “infiltrators,” but the overall effect has been to create an environment of fear for minorities in Assam, many of whom are poor.
None of that is Facebook’s doing. But as we have seen before in…