The other day, as our Prime Minister Narendra Modi shook hands with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook suddenly painted itself in tricolours. Almost everyone had changed their profile pictures in support of ‘Digital India’.
It caught up. Soon, I felt I was perhaps one of the only ones who hadn’t done it. All of a sudden, I stumbled across another post. This one, apparently spelled out doom for this new trend. It claimed that by changing Display pictures (DPs), we would be lending our support to internet.org, something that goes against the much fought-for net neutrality.
Alarmed, many people began sharing this information, and as it went viral, Facebook clarified.
The clarification
Facebook basically said as much, saying it was a mistake by the engineer who used the wrong shorthand name in the Web code. The company’s statement reads:
“There is absolutely no connection between updating your profile picture for digital India and Internet.org. An engineer mistakenly used the words “Internet.org profile picture” as a shorthand name he chose for part of the code. But this product in no way connects to or registers support for Internet.org. We are changing the code today to eliminate any confusion.”
How it started
Nikhil Vishnu, co-founder and CEO of Mobapper discovered something that he uploaded in a public post on Facebook.
“But just before clicking submit I checked the source code of the page. Wow! there I can see the style class named as “internetOrgProfilePicture_prideAvatar”. I don’t think this is accidental. So what I am promoting here? Internet.org or digital india campaign,” he wrote.
And then, the the rest is history.