Social Media, Speech and Society
Written on March 28th, 2020 by {"login"=>"jcbitshyd", "email"=>"journal@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in", "display_name"=>"Journal Club, BPHC", "first_name"=>"", "last_name"=>""}Introduction
Over the past 10 years, there has been a paradigm shift in the social fabric of the world, thanks in no small part to the rise of internet behemoths like Facebook, Netflix and Google. Their services now play a critical role in our lives and have monopolized several verticals; killing or transforming several industries. Their utility in this day and age is undeniable. However, their ubiquity exposes new legal and social challenges and many countries are yet to tame the rapidly evolving Wild West that is the digital world. And the repercussions are far-reaching and devastating.
A simple example of this is the growing problems of “fake news” and misinformation, enabled by platforms like Facebook, Twitter and of course, WhatsApp. In India, WhatsApp has been held responsible for silently propagating millions of falsified messages and media as well as propaganda pieces that has led to the fostering of communal sentiments in the wake of the CAA [1] and even dozens of mob lynchings [2][3]. In Myanmar, the United Nations has accused Facebook of ignoring massive amounts of anti-Rohingya rhetoric spreading on their platform, describing it as a “useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate” [4]. In this article by the Atlantic, we learn how Donald Trump’s digital campaign effortlessly exploits the capabilities of ad platforms and social media to micro-target and induce fear in American voters. These examples illustrate just how simple and powerful disinformation campaigns are, and how they are generating rifts in communities and even threatening the very idea of a democracy.
When asked for a solution to this conundrum, legislators may ask the companies to “block the misinformation” and “trace and persecute the perpetrators”. However, this line of thought is far too idealistic. It suggests that these companies bear a resemblance to traditional print or television media, which is simply not the case. We need to also consider the fact that many countries guarantee the freedom of speech and expression and the Internet can easily guarantee anonymity. While the companies have a role to play in this issue, we must realize that they simply serve as a platform to spread and amplify this misinformation. The real problem is the actors who use this platform to spread the message they desire, and the populace for believing it and acting on it without verification. And now, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, with all the fear and panic in the world right now, the potential for disinformation to wreak havoc is greater than ever. This article aims to go in depth regarding the issue.
Part 1: Free Speech in an Internet Age.
The right to free speech and expression is often quoted as being one of the cornerstones of any successful democracy. Many states have legal protections against attempts by the government to curb this right. However, most states also recognize that free speech needs to come with restrictions, but what these restrictions should be and how they should be implemented are a subject of endless debate.
It is essential to keep in mind that free speech is both about people trying to spread something they seem to believe in and about people having a chance to listen to people who have views that differ from their own. Democracies are fundamentally about the rule of the people, and free expression of views is one of the ways to ensure that the people are capable of self-rule. The populace should be informed of multiple views on a subject, understand, verify and reconcile them and then adopt his/her stance on said issue. This enables them to contribute to the democratic process effectively. Democracy is a form of government with a strong informational underpinning. This willingness to just keep an open mind is the biggest counter to any disinformation campaign. In this idealistic world of ours, restricting free speech would be unnecessary, since every piece of information with malicious or inflammatory intent would not have any effect.
However, the reality is that India and most other democratic societies are heavily fragmented. Both on traditional lines like religion, caste, creed and race and along the lines of personal attributes like political affiliation and economic status. We are raised with biases towards or against certain communities, and we develop some from personal experience. Every single one of us is a multifaceted being, with layers upon layers of likes and aversions. It can be shockingly easy to focus our hatred at communities that have done little to deserve it, even if we have little idea of the true nature of said community. It is easy for us to take up arms and fight along these lines with people we barely know and who have done nothing to hurt us. It is easy to treat a community as a homogenous entity, discarding the inherent variety of humanity that we are so eager to acknowledge otherwise.
In a reality like this, the ability to speak freely and listen to what others have to say becomes more important, not less. It is easy to let our biases fester and become all-consuming. But just knowing what the other side has to say, knowing how they feel, is one of the most powerful examples of the power of information. And at the very least, we, as the generation that will come to run the world someday, owe it to ourselves to be driven by facts, not feelings. It is not that dislike and hatred is wrong, they are clearly an implicit part of the human psyche. Disliking someone or some community just because someone else you know does, or because your family does, or because they are of a religion or caste isn’t fair to them. How would a person feel if he was hated not because of who he/she is, but just because you’re Chinese or Indian, or wealthy or poor, or belonging to a certain branch or club?
At first, the Internet can seem to help further this goal of disseminating information. It is unarguably the largest and most in-depth trove of information that has ever existed in the history of mankind. Each and every one can access and contribute to it, at least in theory. Of course, just like any information source we need to keep an open eye for mistruths and inflammatory content. The internet has the power to revolutionize free speech and usher in a golden age of strong and well-balanced democracies. At least that would be the case, if Facebook and other social media networks had not come to be what they are today.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media networks can be classified as curation-driven services. This means that the content you see is content the service feels appeals to you. Like a page, get more of that page’s posts; like a story, get more stories like that; interact with a person, get more of their updates. This results in a rather curious situation where one’s opinions are moulded and tweaked by an algorithm, in a subtle and unquantifiable manner. This doesn’t even have to only apply to geopolitical or economic views but say, even your favourite artist or actor.
Facebook is the biggest player in this space, by far. And many would say it is the worst offender with regards to this, with both Instagram and Facebook known to be massive sinks for attention and time for billions of people. It now stands to be one of the few companies which have a massive increase in user activity during the coronavirus epidemic, with people stuck at home utilizing its services more than ever before. “The usage growth from COVID-19 is unprecedented across the industry, and we are experiencing new records in usage almost every day,” Alex Schultz and Jay Parikh, Facebook vice presidents who work on the infrastructure, said in a blog post on Tuesday.
Facebook and Instagram both have a central ‘News Feed’, an infinite stream of curated content interspersed with personalized ads. Everything about this system is designed to engage the user and make them spend increasing amounts of time using the service. An infinite, dynamic feed means a person is likely to end up scrolling for hours mindlessly. The gratification some people get from receiving likes and comments makes them want to post more and more often. And the content in the news feed itself is razor-focused, with over 2000 kinds of user data collected and processed in a machine-learning system to generate it, and the algorithms themselves are tweaked from time to time for higher efficiency [6]. And the system works. The average user uses Facebook and Instagram for nearly an hour each per day. And these engagement numbers seem to only be going higher. Facebook has an obvious interest in making sure you use its services as often as possible, with it being able to serve liberal amounts of ads and also collect hundreds of data points, which will allow it to display even more targeted ads and train its algorithms to consume even more of your time, a vicious cycle of profit. It seeks to become a fundamental part of the internet itself and play an irreplaceable role in our lives. Other companies, including traditional news companies are buckling under the pressure it exerts.
The news feed may initially seem to espouse the concepts of free speech, by giving people access to a boatload of information at their fingerprints. This is undeniably true. However, an important distinction to make is that quantity of information does not equate to quality. Hundreds of re-posts of the same meme or news article or video does not count as information. We need to have access to a variety of information. And Facebook’s algorithms, in a blind quest for maximal user engagement, eventually generate a news feed that it thinks reflects the user’s views and interests, irrespective of whether these views hold. And quite often, a user would develop said view and adopt it as his/her own based purely on the news feed, a rather cruel and efficient version of peer pressure.
It has been demonstrated as early as 2011-2012 that the news feed of a person that leaned towards the left would gradually only come to show only updates from other progressive friends, while his conservative friends would grow more and more hidden [6]. A more relatable example would be the profile of a person liking pop music in general having a slight inclination to Taylor Swift, would eventually develop a feed with only Taylor Swift-centric content. This may make you happy, but do you really like Taylor Swift that much? Or were you forced to grow to like Taylor Swift? This question is extremely difficult for anybody to answer. The news feed is, in many ways, the antithesis of free speech, a for-profit company’s effort to indirectly dictate your interests in order to profit from it. It goes beyond propaganda in some ways, because propaganda was never this effective and never this all-encompassing. It may not appear to hold much relevance right now, but this sort of behavioural change purely on the power of information is something many malicious actors’ lust after. In political circles, this subversion technique is a gold mine for influencing voters, generating votes and bypassing democratic processes. Facebook has now become a tool in the arsenal of many actors, and ushers in a new age of information warfare.
Facebook has always been a company that aggressively pushed for growth and profit, even at the expense of morals and user security. It has been accused of everything from selling data to compromising user privacy, to even manipulating democratic processes in various countries and playing a part in terrorist attacks, riots and massacres. Yet it still pursues growth. It still wants to connect people. And the more people it connects, the more free speech becomes an illusion, the more disinformation campaigns become stronger, the more the truth becomes elusive.
“We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China someday. All of it.”
“So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies.”
“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”
“And still we connect people.”
“The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.”
“The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.” [8]
-- “The Ugly”, a leaked internal Facebook memo written by Facebook Vice President Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, 2016.
[1] - https://thewire.in/media/cab-bjp-whatsapp-groups-muslims
[2] - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-destroyed-village-lynchings-rainpada-india
[3] - https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and-violence-in-india/
[4] - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-myanmar-rohingya-genocide
[5] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/
[6] - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/
[8] - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data
Written by Kevin K. Biju