'Un'-social media? How to regulate a technological challenge to democracy

All stakeholders need to come together to find a regulatory solution and prevent social media from turning unsocial

On March 20, 2019, Press Information Bureau released a press notification titled ‘Social Media Platforms present “Voluntary Code of Ethics for the 2019 General Election” to Election Commission of India”.

“The Code of Ethics has been developed as a follow-up to yesterday’s meeting with IAMAI and representatives of social media platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Google, ShareChat and TikTok, etc,” said the notification.

On March 18, 2019, Dhruv Rathee, a famous Indian YouTube star said that his popular Facebook page (544,000 likes) had been banned for 30 days by the social media platform. According to Rathee, Facebook said that one of his posts violated its community standards. Rathee, who has more than 1.7 million followers on YouTube posts videos giving his take on political issues and is known to be critical of the Narendra Modi-led government. This action by Facebook attracted criticism online; Rathee’s page was restored 12 hours later and Facebook admitted to an error on its part.

This action against Rathee’s page brought to focus the issue of regulating content (especially political) on social media. Business Standard tried to take a closer look at the issues involved and spoke to experts. We will break the findings into four parts for easier understanding.

Part 1: Influence

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released an election year study of media habits across India on March 25, 2019. The study was based on a survey of Indians who accessed information online in the English language. The revelations were eye-opening. Four things stood out:

* News is consumed the most through mobile phones (68%)

* More news is consumed through search (32%) and social media (24%) than directly (18%)

* Online news has outpaced print by a wide margin as the primary source of news (56% vs 16%)

* WhatsApp is the biggest social media platform (82%) followed by Facebook (75%), and more than half the users get their news from these platforms (52%)

These numbers state the importance of digital media in the country and underline the unique standing that social media has as far as news and therefore influence is concerned. In a democratic country like India — especially in the poll season — social media’s influence is all-pervasive.  

This brings forth two questions about this influence:

Bias or partisanship: The suspension of Dhruv Rathee’s Facebook page, highlighted above, is a case in point. If social media has strong influence, as numbers from the Reuters study prove, suspensions like this can have an influence a free and fair political discourse online. Social media platforms don’t just provide a platform for any or all views/content to be posted but also perform an editorial function. Take Facebook for example. A Facebook user’s timeline is not just a plain, chronological listing of all the posts by his or her friends. This timeline is actually populated by Facebook using its complex algorithms. Not every post becomes visible here. This is a unique curation performed by a computer code. This provides Facebook an editorial control over a user’s timeline. In Rathee’s case, Facebook exercised its powers to suspend the popular page altogether. In a politically charged atmosphere, these powers can tilt the discourse in one or the other direction.

Subversion: Donald Trump won the US elections in 2016 to become the President. The elections were fought bitterly and Russian influence was found to be a major factor. This ‘hacking’ of the American election was later confirmed by various reports released by US senators. Russian influence through social media was not just limited to elections, however. Troll farms used by Russia Internet Agency based out of St Petersburg tried to manipulate American politics. While foreign powers (or individuals) have always tried to influence politics, discourse and elections in other countries even in the past, social media has provided them with the most powerful weapon in history.

As Russian influence in American elections (and elsewhere) shows, subversion of the political discourse or elections is a major threat. The power of social media was also highlighted during the recent tensions between India and Pakistan following Indian airstrikes in Pakistan’s Balakot. It is perhaps for the first time in human history that a country’s propaganda against its enemies has not been restricted by geography; the population of both sides has access to the other’s narratives. This creates new challenges for governments and also for the state in general as far as holding free and fair elections are concerned.

Part 2: Regulatory vacuum

According to the PIB notification of March 20, social media companies and IAMAI presented a voluntary code of ethics for general elections 2019. Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora, while welcoming this, also said that this was a work in progress. Social media’s growth in India and across the world has been a fast evolving phenomenon. Its growth and its deep influence raises more questions about regulation and presents new challenges for policy makers in the country.

Alok Prasanna Kumar, advocate and a senior resident fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Karnataka, highlights this challenge as he says: “The legal provisions we have right now have become outdated in light of changes in technology. We do need regulation to make social media companies responsible for content and how they moderate it.”

S K Mendiratta, the longest-serving legal advisor to the Election Commission of India admitted the need for a regulatory mechanism for social media. “This need has been felt for a long time. The code of ethics created by social media companies is a step in the right direction”, he said.

“There is also a data protection challenge which is unique for elections as the disclosure of electoral names and data are necessary to check fraud. However, such data sets have been aggregated with other data sets and profiles of leanings and biases can be used to target and influence voters which can be a form of manipulation. This requires legal and regulatory clarity which is missing at present,” said Apar Gupta, lawyer and executive director, Internet Freedom Foundation.

Part 3: Who should be the gatekeeper?

Who should be the gatekeeper for social media, especially during the period of model code of conduct? While a need for regulatory mechanism is felt, who should man it?

“Regulation of social media companies should be left to the government,” says Prasanna. On the unique challenge that elections pose, he adds: “Setting down principles of intermediary liability and holding them accountable to it should cover more contexts than just the elections”.

Should the Election Commission take on a regulatory role when the model code of conduct comes into play?

Mendiratta says we first need a regulation and then we can take a look at this aspect as well. Prasanna, on the other hand, differs and adds a note of warning: “We should be careful of giving the EC too many powers because there are very few ways of holding them accountable for the use of such powers. EC's job is already very complex. They should not have to additionally fight legal battles with social media companies over elections. The government has more tools than the EC to enforce and implement regulations.”

The limited and immediate nature of an Election Commission’s job is also perhaps another reason against giving such regulatory powers over social media to it.

Part 4: The industry

The social media industry has globally been under fire from governments, activists, political parties and even feminist organisations. The Reuters study referred to earlier points out the lack of trust in news in India. Disinformation and hyperpartisan content are two of the major concerns highlighted by the study. Social media ends up exacerbating issues like disinformation (fake news) with its widespread distribution. While the spread of misinformation is the dominating question in the election season in India, data privacy concerns are the other major issue that plagues this industry.

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke last year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the US Senate in April 2018 to answer questions about political data mining by agencies like Cambridge Analytica.

In India, the Supreme Court last year held Right to Privacy as a fundamental right. This creates questions about data privacy on social media in India and the regulatory challenges thereof.

WhatsApp, the number one social media platform in the country, on April 2 introduced a new feature that allows users to submit for review the messages that they think are misleading or carry unsubstantiated information.

On April 1, Facebook said, as part of its larger attempt to stem the spread of misinformation, it had taken down over 1,100 pages, groups, and accounts linked with India’s two largest political parties and Pakistan from the platform as well as Instagram in India. Some of these were related to the two leading political parties in India, the Congress and BJP.

This action from Facebook might have been part of the code of ethics shared by the social media companies earlier. Election season 2019 is only warming up and we are days away from the first round of polling, but these elections and the pitched battles fought on social media have pointed out the pitfalls to us. Perhaps it is time we looked for long-term and workable regulatory mechanism to help users, news media, digital media organisations, the society and the state navigate this world and make it more reliable and useful. Social media poses a technological challenge to democracy and resolving the contradictions will have to be done by all the stakeholders.

Twitter: @bhayankur