From lack of credible information to misinformation diarrhoea we
have encountered everything and almost everywhere in the world. Yet credible
news is absolutely non- negotiable for the health of any democracy. It helps us
to form our choices and mould our opinions. We have grown up to believe that
what is printed in a newspaper is a fact and we have seen journalists going to
jail rather than compromise facts during the Emergency days. But when
journalists start towing party lines and get clubbed in two teams
- ’liberals’ and 'ultra-nationalists' you have the perfect recipe for a
dish called 'misinformation'.
For democracy to succeed there has to be a free flow of credible
information. We have in our lifetime seen a wide spectrum of information
delivery from government restricted news, which sounded more like propaganda
and less like reality. I am sure you remember the coverage of the 1962 Chinese
aggression during the Nehru era and the ‘Garibi hatao' sloganeering
during Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s period in their family run National Herald in
India. The sugar and spice and everything nice published in Span and Life from
the U.S and incomparable Tass and Pravda of the erstwhile USSR dishing out
their Government manufactured news are overseas examples of this syndrome. As
the news sources were scanty, with people of the world not yet connected by the
Internet, truth was what the government of the specific country wanted us to
believe.
Today we have reached the other end of the spectrum. The
unchartered seas of social media, created by Big Tech oligarchs, are full of
dangerous icebergs and hazardous shoals and reefs of misinformation and deceit.
Unknown to us these new media mughals have hidden algorithms in their
programmes that monitor our Internet searches and create our individual personality
profiles and then they go about, in a very subtle way, to either reinforced our
biases or subtly alter them for meeting their own commercial and their
sponsors' ideological objectives. They prioritize the spread of lies like
Trump's 'stolen elections' and propagate anger and hate instead of facts like
we are observing with the farm laws in India.
Fabricated facts or 'factoids' as they were called during the
Vietnam War days have now metamorphosed into 'truthful hyperbole ' and
'alternative facts' in Trump era. Weaponizing misinformation and repeating 'big
lies' again and again are used by everyone from a defeated American President
to deceitful Islamic and communist states in our neighborhood. This business of
spreading misinformation and creating mischief is on steroids today and from
killing of non Muslims in Kashmir to protest against CAA to farmer's agitation
to vaccine hesitancy every evil can be attributed to this thriving industry of
manufactured falsehood. Faultlines on the basis of political ideology,
religious beliefs, chauvinism and hyper-nationalism are very easy to create,
maintain and exploit and democracies are more vulnerable to them.
The so-called “power law” of social media, a well-documented
pattern in social networks, holds that messages replicate most rapidly if they
are targeted at relatively small numbers of influential people with large
followings. Researchers have also looked at the relative effectiveness of
trolls versus bots. Bots, which are automated programs that masquerade
as people, tend to be particularly good for spreading massive numbers of highly
emotional messages with little informational content. Think here of a message
with the image of a popular politician behind bars and the words “Lock Him Up!”
That kind of message will spread rapidly within the echo chambers populated by
those who already agree with the basic sentiment that this politician is the
root of all evil. Bots have considerable power to inflame people who are
already like-minded, though they can be easier to detect and block than trolls.
By contrast, Trolls are typically real people who spread
provocative stories and memes. Trolls can be better at persuading
people who are less convinced and want more information. Political parties
employ a team of trollers to run their campaign of misinformation on Facebook
and WhatsApp to serve their political goals.
Surpassing BBC, CNN, TIMES, TOI and AIR Facebook has become the
largest distributor of news but instead of using this premier position
judiciously and honestly what did the whistle-blower employee Ms. Frances
Haugen tell us? She said that the largest news portal is putting profit before
the need to curb hate speech and misinformation. Facebook is biased against
facts and is making no efforts to arrest the flow of misinformation. Its
subsidiary WhatsApp has created havoc in India, Brazil and Philippines causing
violent protests, riots and mob lynching. Yet they claim that they are simply
the medium and they are not responsible for the contents of the posts they
host! So it is a case of profit without responsibility. Political parties and
terror outfits use these social media platforms as weapons to inflame passion,
hate, malice, revenge, retribution and anger. There are impressionable and
unemployed youngsters, particularly in poor Islamic countries, who are easily
swayed by these falsehoods and get inducted in and indoctrinated by terror
outfits. Was this the objective of the Big Tech companies?
What is the way forward? How can the information highway be
recaptured from the hands of the high priests of misinformation? The Nobel
Prize for Peace this year went to two brave journalists Maria Ressa of
Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia who have bravely swam against the tide
of misinformation in their respective countries despite being the target of
troll by government sponsored zealots. Their work should serve as a beacon of
truth and encourage others in their tribe to emulate them. What gets published
in newspapers and broadcasted or telecasted as news should regain its sanctity
and be ruthlessly unbiased. A free press is after all the fourth pillar of
democracy along with legislative, executive and judiciary.
Facebook today is fighting through a tangled morass of
privacy, free-speech and moderation issues with governments all over the world.
It has been hit with a series of scandals that have bruised its image, enraged
its critics and opened up the possibility that in its quest for global
dominance, it may have created something it can’t fully control. It only
reminds me of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” When the scientist Victor
Frankenstein realizes that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue he exclaims
“I had been the author of unalterable evils, and I lived in daily fear lest the
monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness.” When
Mr. Mark Eliot Zuckerberg built Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004,
nobody could have imagined it becoming a censorship tool for repressive regimes,
an arbiter of global speech standards or a vehicle for foreign propagandists
and terror organizations. Mr. Zuckerberg has his job cut out; he has
created a Frankenstein and now he has to tame it.
The real danger is if
regulators end up losing their patience with digital literacy initiatives and
find greater willingness to employ illiberal solutions. This is no longer
limited to autocratic governments, which have a willingness to leverage
the issue to crack down on political dissent; increasingly democracies are
testing the waters too. In the absence of effective and democratic policy
remedies, the misinformation problem might lead developing countries to adopt
an increasingly autocratic approach to governing.
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