Regulating algorithm future of media

The Reuters Institute for Studies in Journalism recently published its annual survey of the digital news landscape across the globe. The survey, while highlighting the global shift towards increasing consumption of digital news, also revealed some unique facets of digital news consumption in India. While 63 per cent of the respondents use social media as their source for news, more stunningly, 53 per cent cited YouTube as the social media platform for digital news consumption and an equally sizeable 51 per cent sourced their news from WhatsApp.
 

Both of these findings hold immense significance for two entirely different reasons of opacity.

In the case of YouTube as any digital news channel provider would be able to confirm, a majority of the audience discover news content through the platform’s recommendation algorithms. With such algorithmic sourcing of traffic being the primary mode for content discovery, it is an open question if the algorithms are privileging certain kinds of news reporting over others and what if any editorial biases are recommended more often than others. Questions of this nature have no clear answers due to the opacity of these recommendation algorithms. In the case of WhatsApp with peer-to-peer sharing of news content contributing significantly to virality, there is no mechanism by which one can monitor trends of virality in the public domain. Opacity around viral content makes it that much harder to check fake news or to counter disinformation while end-to-end encryption makes it virtually impossible to trace sources of such viral content.

Opacity over the manner in which social media platforms, also referred to as intermediaries, conduct themselves is one of the most formidable of regulatory challenges facing India. This opacity also extends to more controversial issues that have made headlines around deplatforming. Recent events in the US and during the Ukraine-Russia conflict have shown that deplatforming can happen rather overnight and as we have witnessed in the case of RT, the Russian state media service, that an entire point of view can be blocked globally by these platforms. Several instances of arbitrary decisions by Twitter in India have come to light where handles have either been blocked or suspended without transparency from the platform on the reasons for such unilateral actions. While deplatforming is an extreme step without recourse to an appellate process or grievance redress, we have also seen social media platforms exercising editorial judgement with political overtones on certain kinds of media shared on these platforms which is tantamount to the platform taking a partisan political stance on an issue.

Clearly the regulatory environment in India has to gear up to address these emerging challenges given the increasingly important role social media platforms are playing in the discovery and consumption of digital news as has been revealed by the Reuters Institute study.
 

The issues around regulating opacity in the algorithms, datasets of public interest and associated policies of social media platforms assume acute significance when one considers the lack of a regulatory level playing field between broadcast and digital media on the one hand and the plateauing of the reach of broadcast media in India. An analysis of the television audience universe during 2020-2021, when several addresses to the nation were delivered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, reveals that the broadcasts on Covid-19 and related lockdowns reached not more than 200 million viewers. With the cellular phone penetration in India at least four times or higher than that figure, it is likely that social media platforms will in the near future exercise significant power as gatekeepers in either growing or stunting the reach of such live broadcasts to a plurality of citizens who are fast switching from conventional TV/radio to internet streaming over smartphones. One should not be surprised if emerging 5G-based technologies such as Direct to Mobile (D2M) broadcasting catch the eye of regulators and policy makers in India, given the potential to reach citizens directly on their smartphones thus disintermediating the social media platforms and their opaque algorithms from playing gatekeepers.

While D2M broadcasting will have to await the ubiquitous availability of compatible devices and networks, there is an urgent need for the regulatory framework in India to get ahead of the technology cycle while building capacity to deal with opaque algorithms and the less than transparent datasets and policies that go along with them. An algorithmic regulatory framework that has been built for the future will have to necessarily make extensive use of AI tools and techniques while building capacity and skill sets in emerging technologies. Such a future-proof regulatory framework will also have to break the current silos of laws, jurisdictions to operate in a convergent environment where both traditional and new media are governed over a level playing field. Regulating algorithms is a capability that the Indian state would have to build across sectors such as finance, chemicals, life sciences going beyond the media/social media space given the pace at which AI and other emerging technologies such as quantum computing are hastening radical changes.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push for Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Digital India has seen several bold moves by the government in this direction. Predictably, social media platforms have taken the legal route to challenge these nascent regulatory steps in courts. While it is a business imperative for these platforms to desire a free hand in the name of innovation, it was tad rich when they claimed to be upholding free speech in India. Opacity in algorithms and underlying policies/datasets is no enabler of freedom of speech. On the contrary, such opacity has been found to be privileging certain kinds of political speech over others, raising questions on the neutrality of social media platforms. An algorithmic regulatory framework to tackle this opacity is an urgent imperative for a sovereign democracy like India. It is also an opportunity for India to take a leadership position on building such a future-proof regulatory environment that both fosters innovation and upholds public/national interest.

The author is former CEO, Prasar Bharati