Social Media Is Not Social Service

Social media is not social service. Not that print or electronic media ever was, or is now. But this is about Facebook, Twitter, and a thousand other obscure ones on which the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Prime Minister’s Office, and experts in political parties spend so much time, energy and money.

They, the people in power and those aspiring for it, presume social media is their hand maiden, and will help them in what the military calls "command and control'.

And we, as consumers and citizens, spend much time and band width thinking we are expressing ourselves, expanding our circle, force-multiplying our influence over our fellow citizens. We also sometimes fear for our personal data, perhaps even our secret emotions and desires we have made public through our "likes", comments and "searches".

The more civic-minded of us worry that the 'both ends encrypted' WhatsApp and the alternates in Signal and Telegram, are being used by our enemies to target us personally, to mobilise mobs, to radicalise and train killers.

That is true. As the real and fake police records and charge-sheets show, to the acute eye, WhatsApp was used to link, tag teams, coordinating their movements in various acts of violence, most recently in the area of North-East Delhi, to murder in cold blood Muslims who are now being seen as national enemies.

But targeted hate is not a creation of social media. Nor is targeted violence. It existed in the era of the drum beats, the whispers, the old-style landline telephones. That is the record of India since its bloody partition in 1947. The crazed mobs that burnt alive or killed by other means more than 5,000 Sikh men and boys in 1984 on the streets of the national capital, or Muslims in a major act of violence almost every year, or Christians in Kandhamal twelve years ago this monsoon season, were not mobilised on Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp. The groundwork was sustained by old-fashioned footwork, rumours and incendiary speech.

It is important to understand this, and delink a study of social media and the prevalence of politically sponsored and assiduously nurtured targeted hate and violence.

Social media is a business, a multi-national corporate business where the articles of commerce are two commodities -- data and band-width. Both, alone, are not of much use. Together, they mint money. For all the smart talk of encryption, and the Supreme Court guarantees of privacy, nothing is a secret to those in the know, or the ones with the knowhow.

Those in power know everything about us -- our birth details and family, our income and expenditure, our biometrics and our medical history, or insurance and our accidents, our employment, provident fund, bank balances and instalments.  The silicon chip in the computer has made access faster. That is all. The trader could cheat easier in the olden days of the red cloth covered "bahi" and the faithful "munim". But now his business turnover is quicker and multiplies faster.

The czars of the social media cash in on the collation of this information, now called data. In their hands, data is a commodity, and like any other commodity, to be sold and purchased, value-added and traded. Even banked.

In an article in Seema Mustafa-edited The Citizen, Manoj J Dutta writes: In a " Communicative capital, the consolidation of communicative infrastructures to drive profiteering, forms the face of twenty-first century neoliberalism. From Facebook to Amazon, digital communication is one of the most profitable sites of capitalist expansion.

"Communicative capital is intertwined with financial and technological capital, drawing on the global networks of finance and simultaneously creating new sites and spaces for financialization. Communicative capital works through the commercialization of human participation on digital platforms, turning likes, shares, and comments into profitable resources. Of the wide array of human emotions on digital platforms that drive profiteering, hate is a powerful resource that draws in viewers, propels shares, and creates networks of flow."

Hate, he writes, has the potential of generating large profits because of its virality.
When hate goes viral, it propels the economic infrastructures of hate groups, hate-based political parties, and digital corporations. Digital hate, the commercialization of hate into a profitable commodity on digital platforms, drives both profiteering on the digital platforms as well as the political agendas of parties and hate groups that thrive on hate.

That is a deep insight that we need to ponder.

Like any corporate entity, including those in brick and mortar, and those trading in notional wealth on the stock exchange, social media also thrives on inside information, patronage, and political protection. It buys protection by obliging the controlling powers in whatever they want from it just short of fatally hurting its commercial interests. Facebook will therefore, in the US, be kind to those who matter and call it Freedom of Expression, and in India, hire people who will be its conduits to the party, and the man, in power, in turn muting his enemies.

The enemy can be Rahul Gandhi. But Gandhi and the Congress party as such are too big. Their active followers and fellow travellers can be. The catchwords, or hashtags, for use of the algorithms, will not be ‘Rahul Gandhi’ or ‘Sonia Gandhi'. They will, for instance, use ‘Nehru’, or some other catch phrase chosen by the powerful against a person or entity that is less powerful, but still perceived as a threat. Hiring a niece or a nephew, or someone recommended by a minister or a party, and paying her or him a large salary is therefore in the nature of a bribe. In the case of a regime change, that person will be thrown out much as an insect in a jug of milk, to use a pre-social media expression. Or perhaps she will become the new power's conduit into the social media. Stranger things have happed.

There is no need here to go into specific instances which have been narrated daily in media. The blocking, harassment and targeting began even as the then Gujarat Chief Minister was making his successful bid for power in New Delhi back in 2013.

One of their targets was a technocrat, Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad. He is not a typical example of people targeted for writing what the typical Sangh follower would deem to be belittling any of their heroes, Narendra Modi, Sardar Patel, or Mohan Bhagwat. But Ravi trained at the celebrated Carnegie Mellon university in the United States is the son of H Y Sharada Prasad, long term advisor to Indira Gandhi, and then for some time also to her son. Ravi has been an eye witness at very close quarters to a pretty large chunk of contemporary history of India even as it was being written.

He has been banned, blocked, suspended more times by Facebook and Twitter than most people. He narrated his experience with Social media in an interview with this writer:

"I have been banned by Facebook and Twitter five times since 2013. It started in November 2013 when I got into a slanging match on a television panel discussion with Amit Malaviya of the BJP IT cell on their trolling activities. Since then, the BJP IT cell keep reporting all of my posts as hate speech, and as violating Facebook's Community standards.

"My posts on Indira Gandhi were reported as glorifying someone who carried out a genocide on Sikhs.

"In 2014, my posts on why Jawaharlal Nehru was made Prime Minister in preference to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel were reported as glorifying someone who oppressed Hindus, and my Facebook account was suspended for one month. Then all of my posts about Tipu Sultan were reported as glorifying someone who massacred Hindus.

"In 2016, my Facebook account was suspended. I had to ask mutual friends to speak to senior Facebook executives in California to get my account restored, and it was restored after two months. I had to submit copies of my passport, driving licence etc to prove my identity.

“In August 2017, my Facebook account was suspended again for hate speech because of my posts on Tipu Sultan and Allaudin Khilji. Repeated requests to senior management in Facebook received no response. A lawyer friend wrote to his friend who was a senior Facebook lawyer at their headquarters in California. Finally, my Facebook account was restored in January 2018, after five months.

“My brother's posts about our father H Y Sharada Prasad were also reported as violating Facebook's Community standards.

“Even after 2018, my posts about the 1942 Bengal famine being caused by Winston Churchill were flagged by Facebook as violating Facebook's Community standards, and my account was suspended for two weeks. This happened several times. In September 2019, my Facebook account was suspended for one month because of my posts blaming British for atrocities and Churchill for the Bengal famine of 1942.

"My twitter account @rvp was suspended in March 2018 without any warning. After my lawyer friends sent numerous letters to Twitter headquarters in USA, my twitter account @rvp was restored in July 2018, after over four months. Then in October 2019, my twitter account @rvp was again suspended for one month."

It is funny that Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief, accusing the social media platform employees of supporting people from a political predisposition that lost successive elections, and “abusing” Prime Minister and senior Cabinet Ministers.

In turn, the Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala asks: “If Modi Govt has an iota of credibility, why doesn’t it agree to a JPC probe into the shameless collusion between #Facebook India & BJP?”

Prasad makes a joke of himself when he tells Zuckerberg that Facebook is outsourcing fact-checking to third party fact-checkers.

Prasad, or Zuckerberg, will not answer the group of 54 former bureaucrats who have written to Facebook to perform a serious audit of the implementation of the social media company’s hate-speech policy in India in a manner that its India policy head, Ankhi Das, is not in a position to influence investigations. Ankhi Das was seen as a BJP mole by a Wall Street Journal report that said Facebook India intervened in content moderation processes to ensure hate speeches by a BJP leader were not taken down.

Zuckerberg, an international version of Ambani or Adani, will do what is good for his accounts book, not what is good for democracy and communal harmony in India. And for the moment, he will do what Mr Modi expects him to do. Both benefit. What businessmen call a win-win situation.