Days after Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad warned Facebook of stringent legal action against any misuse of data of its over 200 million Indian users, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked each Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP to get at least 300,000 likes on their Facebook page.

Hindustan Times reported that the target was set on Friday in a dinner meeting that Modi and party president Amit Shah had with BJP MPs at the new party headquarters in Delhi.

The report added that PM Modi stressed on genuine likes and not the one ‘bought’ through marketing companies. The parliamentarians were asked to stay active on the virtual ground and utilise social media for increasing connect with people and promoting public welfare schemes after it was found that 43 of the party MP do not hold a 'facebook' account while 77 did not have their accounts verified.

“The PM offered to address, through live video call, the mandal-level workers in our constituencies if we achieved this target,” the BJP MP said on condition of anonymity.

Earlier this month, news surfaced that the UK-based Cambridge Analytica firm used personal information harvested from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without permission to build a system that could target US voters with personalised political advertisements based on their psychological profile.

According to reports, Facebook has received a number of warnings about its data security policies in recent years and had known about the Cambridge Analytica data breach since 2015, but only suspended the firm and the Cambridge university researcher who harvested user data from Facebook earlier this month. A former Facebook manager has warned that hundreds of millions of users are likely to have had their private information used by private companies in the same way.

On Sunday, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also apologised for “a breach of trust” in advertisements placed in papers including the Observer in Britain and the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

“We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it,” said the advertisement, which appeared in plain text on a white background with a tiny Facebook logo.

Facebook is facing allegations of being allegedly used for influencing polls in the United States. Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with The New York Times, last week had referred to the artificial intelligence (AI) tools deployed by Facebook to detect fake accounts trying to manipulate news and influence the elections.

“The new AI tools we built after the 2016 elections found, I think, more than 30,000 fake accounts that we believe were linked to Russian sources who were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the US in the 2016 election. We were able to disable them and prevent that from happening on a large scale in France,” Zuckerberg told the newspaper.

“This is a massive focus for us to make sure we’re dialled in for not only the 2018 elections in the US, but the Indian elections, the Brazilian elections, and a number of other elections that are going on this year that are really important,” He added.

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