Be wary of news 'con'tent

The social media’s wildfire syndrome of spreading fake news and video content has already done a lot of harm to the Indian polity as it has led to an exponential increase in cases of mob lynchings, riots and communal disharmony during the past few years.

It has also become a serious concern for the Election Commission of India which is trying hard to find ways how to control the flow of fake news content on social media platforms that can potentially jeopardize free and fair elections thus putting democracy in peril.

Impact on Elections

India witnessed the dangerous impact of social media on elections for the first time in September 2013 when circulation of a fake video titled 'killing of Hindu youths by Muslim mob while they were protecting the honor of their sister' went viral on Youtube and WhatsApp in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh.

Before the police could find that the video was of infamous 2010 killing of two brothers in Sialkot, Pakistan by lynching mob, the frenzy leading to riots had resulted in at least 15 deaths and sown the seeds of polarisation to impact the Lok Sabha elections that were held in 2014.  

The proliferation of fake news, mainly through WhatsApp and Twitter, since has seen an exponential increase and in subsequent elections it has been used successfully by political parties to engage in propaganda, misinformation, character assassination and foment communal polarisation to garner votes and win polls.

Even as the poll watchdog prepares to tackle the onslaught of dangerous content on social media in the run up to 2019 Lok Sabha elections, a study on Computational Propaganda “Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation” done by Oxford University researchers has cautioned that political parties are expected to pour more money into social media to influence results.

It says that formal organization between industry and political parties appears to have occurred in India where political parties and campaign managers have directly hired PR or consulting firms to help spread computational propaganda during elections.

The study also infers that political parties in India are engaging in cyber troops, a pervasive and global phenomenon, to manipulate public opinion by engaging in multiple contracts valued at $ 200,000.   

Worry of Foreign Hand

A major worry before India in today’s volatile geopolitics is that countries like China, Pakistan and other non state actors who want to destabilise or bleed India for their ulterior motives could use these social media platforms to spread discontent in India.

Indian security agencies are apprehensive of the role of Chinese media companies that are increasingly backing content apps operating in India.

The two largest news and entertainment content generator apps in India - NewsDog and UCWeb supported UC News - are China controlled. Their proliferation in tier two cities and vernacular languages has become a major headache for the security agencies.

The agencies have raised a red flag on the content generated by some of these apps as not only it could be used for cyber attacks and spying but also to foment unrest, communal tension and compromise elections by spreading fake news.

UCWeb has about 130 million active monthly users in India, according to latest numbers by the company.

Intelligence agencies have issued a warning listing 42 such applications that are considered dangerous for use as they could be used for cyber attacks, spying and spreading fake news.

These include Truecaller, Wechat, UC News, UC Browser, NewsDog among many others. Antivirus applications Virus Cleaner and DU Cleaner are also on the list.

“There are random links that are being circulated. By clicking on these the sender automatically gets accepted in the group. This indicates that the intruder wants to track the communication,” said a source in the security establishment.

Besides, the implanted app can make the smartphone a client phone and it can be used effectively to proliferate socialbot or chatbots to post content without user’s knowledge.

Intelligence agencies from other countries especially Pakistan and China looking at accessing data could break into smart phones with these applications.

Pakistani terror groups assisted by intelligence agency ISI use servers based in Eastern European countries to break into systems to get sensitive information and to embed and proliferate on popular apps. They are also using WhatsApp to spread hate messages with some degree of success, said a source.

“The possibility that forces inimical to India could use social media platforms, content aggregators Apps and to sway results in favour of their choice of candidates or parties, who can help weaken the country unknowingly or unknowingly, cannot be ruled out. If this can happen in 2016 US presidential elections then why not in India,”said a senior security official.

Tackling the Menace - EU example

The European Union was quick to diagnose the menace of fake and hate content social media. The most common ground for hatred identified by the European Commission was ethnic origins, followed by anti-Muslim hatred and xenophobia, including expressions of hatred against migrants and refugees.

It signed a code of conduct with Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in May 2016 to review most complaints within a 24-hour timeframe.

An evaluation carried out in 24 EU Member States in 2017 showed that the companies had made significant progress by removing hate content in 59% of the cases.

Continuous pressure by the EU to bring the companies under the purview of strict legislation strict legislation further accelerated the speed as by 2018, the companies managed to meet the target in 81 per cent cases.

Eager to fully stop the hate content, Germany went ahead and enacted a legislation that imposes fines up to Euro 50 million if the companies persistently fail to remove illegal content.  

As other EU countries threaten similar action, social media companies are being forced to fall in line to accelerate removal of online hate speech content.

India Wakes Up

Indian government has woken up rather late to the dangers posed by proliferation of hate content on social social media platforms. Until recently, the government was taking up the issue with social media companies on case to case basis. Its approach was to find the hate itself and then flag it to the social media companies with request to block the uniform resource locator (URLs).

From January 2017 to June 2018, the social media companies out of 2,245 requests by the Indian government blocked 1162 URLs for defamatory content.  

Lately, the global concern over the increase in cases of mob lynchings has forced the government to seek tougher action. Besides, a strong view taken by the Supreme Court in cases of fake messages of cow slaughter and child lifting leading to mob lynching has also rushed the government to take proactive action.

After exerting pressure on WhatsApp to stop fake news, hate mongering and political propaganda from getting circulated, the government plans to issue a stern warning to messenger service over its reluctance to trace the origin of the messages, which has been at the center of fake news issue. It is also mulling over bringing a strong law to make the social media companies fall in line like they did in Europe.   

Election Commission’s View

Aware of the enormity of the issue, the Election Commission is planning to treat social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, as potential carriers of fake news that can influence polls, at par with the traditional media. A change in the nomenclature could bring these platforms in the ambit of paid news.   

“We are conscious of the dangers.  There several serious allegations in the global arena against social media platforms. We are taking all steps to contain this so that our elections do not get influenced by it.”

Rawat said the regional heads of social media companies have assured the commission that they would not allow circulation of any false content, which could influence the voters.

Conveying serious concerns regarding possibility of foreign state actors using the opportunity to manage election, former CEC H S Brahma said, “If it can happen in US, it can also happen here. In global era there are multiple geopolitical factors that can come into play.”

Brahma added, there is an urgent need to deal the menace of social media platforms. Either their servers should be located in India and subjected to our scrutiny or we should be able to rein them like EU.

View from the Gallery

According to Shweta Mohandas of CIS (Center for Internet and Society), the Election Commission has realised how social media can be used as a political tool.

Facebook has recently taken the first step to make it easier for users to identify campaigns run and paid by political advertisers in the US, by setting up a searchable archive.

Though it is a difficult task as messages on social media can be sent by any person and even groups can be created and the names or description of the groups can be changed.

WhatsApp is much more trickier as it is very difficult to know when and by whom the message was created, she said.

But Osama Manzar, founder - director of Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), views it differently and says the problem of fake news has always been there.

“There has been a constant effort by the government to regularise online content. It is unfair to categorise social media platforms as paid news for political reasons. This will only jeopardise the democratic status the social media platforms rest on, and probably even increase the problem of fake news," he said.

The government cannot repeatedly rely on technological solutions when what we see ahead of us is a social problem, he said.