All hail the social media industrial complex

BOSTON:

Earlier in January this year, the United States saw perhaps its biggest political unrest in years as supporters of former president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol Hill building. In an unprecedented move, social media giants Facebook and Twitter went on to suspend his accounts as they purged a collective 70,900 profiles linked with the incident.

The ban on Trump, came in lieu of his false claims about the legitimacy of incumbent President Joe Biden’s election win. The rationale being that the amplification of un-substantiated assertions made by an outgoing president would create further unrest and violence. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg subsequently issued a statement wherein he deemed the ‘risks’ of letting the Trump use the platform ‘too great’. The indefinite suspension is now said to last at least till 2023. Twitter, which up until that point was often deemed as the ex-president’s favourite megaphone went a step further as it permanently suspended Trump’s account in the ensuing days.

While welcomed by Trump critics, the move was seen as an example of a few business entities acting as arbitrators in political disputes by many leaders and intellectuals that otherwise opposed the alt-right narrative the former US president and his supporters subscribed to. "I do not think that we can live in a world where too much power is given to a reduced number of companies," United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a news conference a few weeks after the Trump ban. German Chancellor Angella Merkel too expressed similar sentiments at the time, noting that freedom of opinion should not be determined by "the management of social media platforms," according to an AFP report.

Contrary to Zuckerberg’s holistic optimism over the move, Twitter’s co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey viewed the move in a ‘necessary evil’ or ‘last resort’ context. “Having to ban an account has real and significant ramifications," Dorsey said in a series of tweets not long after. "While there are clear and obvious exceptions, I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation." Adding on, he stated that the ban sets a ‘dangerous’ precedent, of course, has global implications.

 

Double standards and market dynamics

Creative: Mohsin Alam

Dorsey’s comments have somewhat foreshadowed the company’s predicament in the Global South as of late. Roughly a month after Trump’s suspension, Twitter removed 500 accounts linked with the farmers’ protest in India at the behest of that country’s government. The company subsequently lifted the suspension for most of those accounts, but at the same time blocked a long list of words from appearing in the Twitter trends section. Furthermore, according to an earlier report published on TechCrunch, Twitter assured that the handles being blocked will still be visible outside of the country.

The Indian government has been adamant in its approach so far in pressurising social media giants to fully adhere to its new set of IT laws that expand the scope of constitutional articles banning expression deemed a threat to national security, public order and decency. Under the new laws, the companies in question reveal the first source of the information that falls into the above mentioned category while also take down content the government considers unfit. Employees of the companies in question can be held legally liable.

Although many of the new laws go against their policy, aside from Whatapp – which filed lawsuit in a Delhi court over its privacy – none of the social media entities have outright challenged the Indian government. According to a report published on TechCrunch, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google are said to have at least partially complied with the new laws. Meanwhile Twitter is still lobbying for an extension even Indian police raided its offices over the labeling of a politician’s tweet as ‘misinformation’.

The Modi administration uses the clampdown on misinformation and expression threatening public order in the West by these tech giants to rationalise its demands. India’s IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad during an interview with News 18 went as far as accusing these companies of having a double standard with respect to India.

Interestingly enough, just over a year ago, the Pakistan Citizens Protection (Against Online Harm) Rules, 2020 was introduced and required all social media companies including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok to register with the government. Under the law, social media platforms will have to create a data server in Pakistan within a year and block any account or prevent or remove any content that “violates or affects the religious, cultural, ethnic or national security sensitivities of Pakistan” and is “involved in spreading of fake news or defamation.” The law empowered PTA to block any content that fell under the aforementioned segments.

The result? Google, Facebook, and Twitter not only condemned the ‘censorship’ initiative but also threatened to leave the country. The Asian Internet Coalition (AIC), which includes tech giants Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, released a statement in which it not only termed the laws as ‘draconian’ but also questioned their practicality. “If Pakistan wants to be an attractive destination for technology investment and realise its goal of digital transformation, we urge the government to work with industry on practical, clear rules that protect the benefits of the internet and keep people safe from harm," the statement read.

Although both governments essentially demanded the same thing – greater control over the flow of information on social media while reaping the benefits of tech infrastructure – one clearly has more leverage than the other. India with over with a population of roughly 1.4 billion is one of the biggest markets for tech companies. The country currently has over 251 million Facebook users, the highest around the world. For Twitter, according to Times of India, the country was named among the highest growing markets as of 2020, with monetiseable Daily Active Users witnessing a 74% Year over Year growth, in the Oct- Dec quarter of that year.

Having just recently banned a host of Chinese apps, among which was popular social media platform TikTok, citing ‘cybersecurity concerns’, as political tensions with China grew, Modi perhaps inadvertently flexed at the likes of Facebook and Twitter: it can do the same to them if need be.

To top it off internally, India has been working on its own social media apps, similar to TikTok. For instance according to a report published on Nikkei Asia, the Benguluru based company VerSe Innovation, which launched the most popular of these clones called Josh, recently raised around $100 million from Microsoft and Google.

Pakistan too had stints of blocking TikTok ( only to unban it after the company agreed to comply with government’s regulatory requests) and has also seen new entrants in the market such as Snack Video. However as mentioned clearly, its not that big a market for tech giants to be intimidated by such moves. Furthermore it is highly unlikely that the government would move towards adopting the China route , ie permenantly banning the likes of Facebook, since it would taint its already crumbling image in the international community over freedom of speech and would also significantly impact its recent commitment to digital commerce.

 

How ‘real’ is ‘fake news’ ?

 

No matter which government out of the two has ‘it better’ with big tech’s frat boys, the public discourse is still in jeopardy. It is true that social media in the past ten years has proved to be an effective alternative to traditional media in empowering freedom of speech and mobilising social awareness initiatives, the most recent being around the Covid-19 vaccine rollout. However the excessive dependence on just a few social platforms as information hubs presents an opportunity for miscreants to manipulate political discourse through misinformation.

Sinan Aral – who is the David Austin Professor of Management, IT, Marketing and Data Science at MIT and Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) – in his book The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health–and How We Must Adapt, discussed how fake news disseminates faster. Aral, in a study in direct collaboration with Twitter that extracted verified fake news from the platform’s archive between 2006-2017, discovered that around “126,000 Twitter cascades of stories were spread by three million people over 4.5 million times”.

Reconstructing retweet cascades through the ‘origin’ tweet of fake news, Aral and his team analysed in what ways it spread it differently than information verified to be true. According to his findings “it took the truth six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people.” Furthermore his findings suggested that false political news reached 20,000 three times faster than all other types of false information reached 10,000 people.

The mechanism behind the spread he identified in most cases was a “complex interaction of coordinated bots and unwitting humans working together in an unexpected symbiosis.” Aral outlines that the intial spreaders of fake news are bots who pounce on it in the first few seconds. This ends up prompting an exponential increase in human engagement around the theme. Additionally bots also tend to mention influential humans in the content in order to drive legitimacy. This increased repetition according to him also increases our susceptability to fake news in what is known as the illusory effect.

Such coordinated effort to drive a narrative on cyberspace by political forces is something that is accepted as fact especially after increasing evidence of Russian misinformation campaigns in the US ahead of its 2016 elections. Citing two studies by the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Aral in his book discusses how Russia’s attack was well planned and sophisticated. The Internet Research Agency, a company that on behalf of the Russian government carries online influential campaigns, had created accounts on multiple social media platforms well in advance that disseminated propaganda material relating to multiple themes in American discourse.

While not every political entitiy can have the same sophistication in terms of cyber-propaganda, it’s a practice that regimes have been privy to for years and perhaps employ domestically. Media and Technology expert, Samantha Bradshaw a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University working with its Digital Civil Soceity Labs along with Oxford Internet Insitute professor and prolific researcher on the use Digital Media on civic engagement and social control Philip N Howard, in a 2018 paper titled The Global Organisation of Social Media Disinformation Campaigns, detailed how political actors have become increasingly adept at leveraging techonology communication tools to manipulate public opinion.

According to their findings, while democracies tend to have a slightly lower degree of formal organisation when it comes to cyber campaigns compared to their outright authoritarian counterparts, they have the highest level of capacity to carry disinformation campaigns. Political parties tend to be the actors and employ the use of bots to carry out campaigns especially during election cycles, to distort political conversations, the paper suggested citing evidence it found of this activity in multiple democracies including United States, Taiwan, Austrailia, the United Kingdom and many more.

Perhaps the governments of both India and Pakistan’s are capable of driving their own ‘soft persuasion’ campaigns through which they can build a narrative that is much in line with their interests, without having to resort to regulations. Then again given overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in US politics, the fears of the neighbouring regimes over social media narrative being left to its own devices are partially justified.

To top it off, given that these social media giants adopted a different set of ethos based on market size, the skepticism over the companies’ internal mechanism to tackle fake news could have some merit. If they are ready to bend their values for one and give an ultimaitum to the other, would they be willing side with the larger market’s narrative on whats real in a hypothetical fifth generation war?

A more realistic scenario could be that the likes of Facebook and Twitter, would less efficatively counter misinformation in markets that are low on its priority lists. Once again, in each scenario it’s the public not the authorities that will be impacted the most.

 

Who will watch the watchmen?

 

Both Facebook and Twitter in the past year have adopted the practice of labeling content as false if its legitimacy is questionable. Especially in regard to fringe theories about the Covid-19 and the subsequent vaccine roll-out, both platforms have for the better in a crucial times countered misinformation that had detrimental effects globally.

The labeling technique in terms of convincing users is found to be effective for the most part. Citing various studies, Aral in his book described these labels as ‘subtle cognitive nudges’ that are enough to make people question the accuracy of information and as a result dampen the spread of fake news.

Interestingly enough Aral warns of an ‘implied truth effect’ whereby information not yet labeled would be perceived to be true. To add more complication, while Twitter has been active in scrutinising political content ( which sparked its ongoing collision with the Indian government), Facebook has for the most part remained hands-free in this regard. A recent instance was Biden’s presidential campaign slamming Facebook over a doctored video floating freely that was labeled by Twitter as manipulated.

In the case of regions that might not add to the bottom line of the social media industrial complex but whose public discourse is dependant on it, who is doing the ‘labelling’is a question that holds great merit in it’s actuality apart from the rhetoric on digital colonialism. In Facebook’s case, according to its website the company involves machine learning and collaboration with several independent fact check organisations to determine the authenticity of fake news.

While this may prove effective for the West, it is fair to ask how nuanced the independent fact checkers are in terms of discourse in Pakistan for instance. A recent example of a dangerous fabricated news spreading across both Twitter and Facebook without being labeled was a video of an Aurat March procession with doctored sub-titles implying a blasphemous nature. By the time it was accepted as inaccurate by mainstream media, it had spread for days, risking the lives of many involved with the procession. Facebook and Twitter’s internal filter of authenticity was found missing in action.

Perhaps local civil society organisations particularly linked with digital media, such as the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan could be furthered empowered by both tech giants and international bodies. Bradshaw in another research paper titled Mapping Civil Society Responses to Disinformation, discussed a host of challenges faced by such groups across the globe, such as insufficient access to data. According to the study, relationships with tech giants vary significantly across regions. In the Global South and Eastern Europe, participants of the study complained that “platforms failed to meaningfully engage with them on critical issues.”

The lesser of all evils?

Earlier in June, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the US House of Representatives introduced four bills on Friday aimed at reining in the power of the tech giants, with one potentially leading to their break-up. For long, the likes of Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon have been under anti-trust scrutiny. Since January this year, following the Capitol Hill fiasco, the power social media giants have over the flow of information is increasingly being made part of the discourse.

Such moves received a significant setback recently after a US federal court threw out antitrust cases brought against Facebook by the FTC and more than 40 states. The reality, however, is that the mantra of ‘breaking up big tech’ does very little to address the ethical concerns of private corporations controlling the flow of information and by extension having significant leverage over public discourse. Aral while discussing possible solutions for the perils of the social media industrial complex critiqued the effectiveness of possible anti-trust legislature against addressing the prolems associated with the likes of Facebook. Equating it with “putting a band-aid on a brain tumour,” he argued that by virtue of Network Effects, (a first mover advantage of sorts a social media company has wherein its value is determined by the increased number of people on it as opposed to the technological features it offers), the most economic regulation can do is push the next Facebook-esque company into dominance.

He instead suggests legislature that enables interportability of networks, similar to how during the messenger era of the 90s, users could interact across platforms. Although he admits that to achieve data and social graph portability in the case of social media platforms is challenging, he argues that it would level the playing field whereby competition would be on the basis of technology and norms between existing and new entrants. It would, as such, diminish the Network Effects phenomenon. The argument being that this would encourage all companies to better their commitment to addressing the social pitfalls inherent in the design of these services.

With respect to the likes of Pakistan and India, more competition in this space would offer smoother terrain for governments to control the flow of information on social media. With a host of platforms to select from, democracies with authoritarian tendencies would natuarally develop policies that favour hypothetical platforms that both facilitate commerce and practice censorship in accordance with the govenrment’s wishes.

In many ways, the leverage big tech has over a developing nation can facilitate freedom of expression and strengthen democracy. Otherwise an equal playing field would give many the option to go the China route, whereby due to the dominance of domestic social platforms, speech that doesn’t align with the regime priorities doesn’t see the light of day.

For a balanced approach that aims to address freedom of expression and excessive leverage, it is pertinent that international bodies such as the UN step in and the likes of Facebook are viewed as more than private businesses. In his interractions with the press a few weeks after the Trump ban on Facebook and Twitter, the UN chief had stressed that it shouldn’t be the company alone to make a decision in this regard. He stressed that a mechanism should be created “in which there is a regulatory framework with rules that allow for that to be done in line with law.”