A list of more than 100 Indian inter-faith couples was recently posted on a Facebook page called Hindutva Varta asking "Hindu lions" to "hunt down" the men on the list. The call for violence sparked outrage on the social media, forcing the social network to suspend the page.
Though the list was posted on January 28, it was pulled down only after a week on Sunday night. The list mentioned the names of 102 couples, followed by the links to their Facebook profiles, Times of India reported.
The list was shared earlier on another Facebook page known as "Justice for Hindus" last November, albeit without a call to violence.
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A Facebook spokesperson told TOI: "Maintaining a safe community for people to connect and share on Facebook is absolutely critical to us. We have policies that prohibit hate speech and credible threats of harm, and we remove such content when we're made aware of it."
A Twitter user with the screen name Satish Mylavarapu claimed responsibility for running the page on Monday.
"I am proud to be admin of that page Hindutva Varta...Will create new page again," the Twitter user wrote from his unverified handle @smylavarapu responding to an Alt News tweet on the page.
The founder of altnews.in, Pratik Sinha told TOI: "When such lists are out in public, they may be misused during volatile times. Law enforcement should step up and take action against the administrator of the page. There is a need for strong legal accountability, and such people need to be put behind bars."
To review this kind of content relating to violence and hate speech, Facebook added 3,000 people in May 2017 to manually go through it.
The Facebook spokesperson said: "We remove credible threats of physical harm to individuals. We also remove specific threats of theft, vandalism or other financial harm. We may consider things like a person's public visibility or the likelihood of real-world violence in determining whether a threat is credible."
