Indicating Its Apparently Special Relationship With The Ruling Party

The Wall Street Journal’s expose of Facebook India’s internal
communications indicating its apparently special relationship with the

ruling party should have resulted in a serious, bipartisan policy discussion
in parliament on the need to find ways to regulate weaponised information
and hate speech on social media.
This discussion would have been particularly important, given technology’s

power to amplify such content with such speed that most civil society or
law enforcement mechanisms find hard to keep pace with.
But as the story of Facebook’s rightward tilt towards the ruling BJP
government broke, Indians got yet another unedifying spectacle of our
parliamentarians’ inability to rise above narrow politics. Instead of an
honest conversation on how to ensure best practices, regulate social media
and make it accountable for the implementation of its own ‘community
standards’, counter allegations by the BJP’s Union minister for both law
and information technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad, muddied the waters.
His letter to Mark Zuckerberg alleging that Facebook has instead shown a

left-liberal bias has further polarised an already divisive debate on the
unadulterated power one tech company wields over public opinion. In all
this, instead of being held accountable, Facebook may eventually be let off
the hook in its biggest market, globally.
Also read: Social Media and Populist Politicians are Natural Bedfellows
The trigger for this latest controversy surrounding the world’s biggest and
most powerful social media platform are stories quoting Facebook India’s
public policy head as having claimed to have “lit the fire” that ensured
Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in 2014, and Facebook India’s clear
message to Menlo Park detailing the need to remain on the right side of
India’s ruling party in order to further its business interests in India.
For a company that provides users predominantly free services yet seeks to
make a profit, there’s got to be a catch. And that catch lies in the use of
Facebook by political parties to ensure that their paid for campaign
messages, political propaganda, and even deliberate disinformation
campaigns reach targeted users who may be undecided politically, or that
such campaigns perpetuate confirmation biases amongst partisan users and
create currency and traction by the speed at which these messages spread.
In the US, Democrats seeking to win the upcoming November elections

have consistently criticised Facebook for key appointments of Republican
Party strategists to its election integrity and public policy team in order to
humour the Trump White House over the past four years. Those criticisms
have reached fever pitch with the upcoming elections. Democrats hoping to
reclaim the presidency have attacked Facebook for allowing deliberately
false Trump campaign ads targeting Joe Biden, without – unlike rivals
Google and Twitter – adding warnings to the content.
That Facebook finds itself once again in the centre of a political battle
should come as no surprise. The Cambridge Analytica scandal that broke
after the 2016 US election first brought to light the manner in which third
parties could both manipulate users towards political ends, and even
monetise the data they leave behind while using the platform. A year later,
UN investigators looking into the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar asked
that Facebook allow for an independent investigation into how its network
was used to spread hatred. In India, researchers have repeatedly pointed to
evidence of an uptick in anti-Muslim rhetoric on the platform , and asked
the platform to step in quickly.
Globally, such weaponised content – driven by criminality, ideology and

identity – has vitiated political discourse, forcing citizens and lawmakers
around the world to call for the need for frameworks of accountability and
responsibility for social media.
Also read: Facebook Hate Speech Row: Can BJP MPs Oust Tharoor as the
Parliamentary IT Panel Head?
The technology companies themselves have so far taken cover behind two
principles. One, that they are mere platforms and not content creators, and
two, that they provide ‘safe harbour’ to voices who feel silenced in more
regulated spaces like the mainstream media.
While it has self-declared community standards that define acceptable

behaviour, for a company with global revenues of $70 billion and net profit
of $18 billion in 2018-19 (possibly way more than the aggregate profits of
all leading traditional media outfits in the West), Facebook must spend far
more than it does currently on both technology and human intervention to
moderate content than it currently does.
To begin with let’s lay down some basic facts. Facebook is an open
platform, which any political or social organisation with resources can use
to amplify its opinion or ideology. Even if its corporate policy bends
towards ruling regimes, the platform is as open to the BJP as it is to the
Congress or any other opposition party. So the challenge for everyone
today is to ensure that the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater.
The question before us all is whether Facebook can establish a credible and
transparent mechanism to curtail the amplification and weaponisation of
hate speech, identify clearly what is political propaganda and take down
content that provokes violence in the real world. The question before us is
of the corporate structures of social media companies that act as
information aggregators that bring business interests into conflict with
content management and moderation. Perhaps the most fundamental
question of all is of the need for a framework of self regulation that ensures
freedoms aren’t censured by a State so powerful that it uses the law against
its own citizens.
Many experts have suggested multiple ways to deal with this. Besides
Facebook setting up its own internal mechanism to separate public policy
teams from those who moderate content, while ensuring that it is the human
and not a machine that factors real world contexts without prejudice. One
could argue that such a ‘Chinese wall’ once existed in traditional media
houses with the Editorial and Advertising heads operating in independent
verticals. Even if that wall is porous today, there needs to be a push to
revive the existence of the editorial filters of honesty, propriety and value.
Also read: Facebook Hate Speech Row Sparks Stricter Look at

Accountability and Lobbying Efforts
A possible solution could be in the creation by Facebook of an external

committee of ombudsmen – from the legal, law enforcement and social
science fraternities – to examine speedily when speech crosses the hate and
violence threshold. By appointing credible ombudsmen, social media
platforms can fulfil their existing claims of creating civil society watchdog
partnerships. Facebook must display a non partisan intent to create space
and willingness for such scrutiny, rather than be seen as profiting from
social and political discord.
While Facebook’s responsibility is to ensure that the content put up by

political parties or any other ideologically driven social group does not
propagate either hate speech or what is now termed ‘borderline’ speech that
can lead to incitement of violence, the issue transcends party politics. It
isn’t – and cannot be – about the BJP or Congress, but about the need for
checks and balances, about asking legitimate questions of accountability to
a corporate behemoth controlling the flow of news and information to over
2.4 billion people around the world.

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The Wall Street Journal’s expose of Facebook India’s internal

communications indicating its apparently special relationship with the

This discussion would have been particularly important, given technology’s

His letter to Mark Zuckerberg alleging that Facebook has instead shown a

Also read: Social Media and Populist Politicians are Natural Bedfellows

In the US, Democrats seeking to win the upcoming November elections

Globally, such weaponised content – driven by criminality, ideology and

While it has self-declared community standards that define acceptable

Also read: Facebook Hate Speech Row Sparks Stricter Look at

A possible solution could be in the creation by Facebook of an external

While Facebook’s responsibility is to ensure that the content put up by

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