New Delhi: The minute Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Prime Minister Narendra Modi changed their profile pictures with a tri-coloured filter, supporting the ‘Digital India’ initiative, many users followed suit.
On Monday, a screen shot of the code used to build the filter was posted on social media and some users apparently drew their own conclusions about how by merely changing the display picture, a user was unknowingly voting in favour of Facebook’s controversial Internet.org initiative and rejecting the idea of net neutrality.
The alleged image showed the code which contained the words ‘internetorg’. What followed were a series of reports about how Facebook had in fact manipulated the users into attributing likes to the internet.org page on the site instead of the digital India page, which was the intended purpose of the filtered display pictures.
However, Facebook has rubbished the claims saying no likes were mistakenly attributed to Internet.org page. The company said it was a ‘mistake’ by an engineer.
"There is absolutely no connection between updating your profile picture for 'Digital India' and Internet.org. An engineer by mistake used the words 'Internet.org profile picture' as a shorthand name he chose for part of the code," a Facebook spokesperson said.
"But this product in no way connects to or registers support for Internet.org. We are changing the code today to eliminate any confusion," he added.
Meanwhile, coders have also argued that the entire claim about misdirected likes is factually incorrect because the use of the 'internetorg' in the code is only a naming convention. It could have been apple/mango/car/abcxyz and the effect would be the same, which is, creating a tri-colour tinted picture.
Apparently, users also ignored the use of the word 'support digital India' in the same code.
Graphs of the number of likes for Internet.org and digital India pages show an increase in digital India's page (intended objective) and not the internet.org page.
Coders also say, “This is only indicative of how little people trust in Facebook's Internet.org and has nothing to do with the Code of the tri colored profile picture.”
With inputs from IANS
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