Social Media Has Changed Our Character

“We have moved away from the idea that Internet-based communication programs are a blessing bestowed upon us by boy wonders” said Cyril Sam, co-author of ‘The Real Face of Facebook in India: a look at how social media has become a propaganda weapon and disseminator of disinformation” at a panel discussion during the book’s launch on Tuesday.

The current set up of social media infrastructure reflected a network of individuals who controlled and manipulated information, he argued. In this regard he claimed that Facebook’s approach to public relation followed a pattern of “publishing a lie, lay low and if caught issue a muted response.”

Apar Gupta, director of advocacy group, Internet Freedom Foundation, highlighted Facebook’s actions when the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was ruling over the introduction of ‘Facebook Zero’, a service that would waive data charges in return for an app bundle, in India.

“Facebook played its part of a villain to perfection,” he said, pointing out how the company took out advertisements and editorials in newspapers that pitched the product as a medium of escaping poverty.

TRAI eventually ruled against Facebook Zero, however, upholding the importance of access to public health, Mr. Gupta said.

Commenting on public discourse through social media, Delhi University professor, Apoorvanand, argued that “WhatsApp has changed our character and language… important issues are being reduced to jokes and memes”. “The advent of social media has given birth to a loud noise while voices were lost out,” he said. He also touched upon problems of the rapid spread of fake news through the platform.

To check the spread of disinformation, Supreme Court advocate Karuna Nundy, suggested the model followed by Wikipedia, the free crowd sourced online encyclopaedia, which assigns different levels of credibility to content curators or editors to verify information, based on their past record.

Similarly, she stressed on the importance of users being educated so as to place information on a hierarchy based on its credibility. She said that the current efforts to employ algorithms to identify hate speeches were resulting in large numbers of false positives and false negatives. As a result individuals were being employed to intervene, however the systems in place aren’t working very well she said.

Prabir Purkayastha, editor of an online publication argued that handing over of social responsibilities such as regulating public discourse to private social media companies was a danger to democracy as these companies would only take care of their own interests, he said. As a counter he said that proposals of breaking up social media monopolies put forth by people like Elizabeth Warren, who’s running for the United State presidency, was a good idea.

Mr. Gupta however said that institutions such as the Competitions Comission of India, the Election Commission and others had not kept up pace and had not shown intent of wanting to fix the problems facing society through social media.―The Hindu