Are Tech Platforms Doing Enough to Combat ‘Super Disinformers’?

This is an excerpt from an op-ed published on TheQuint.

On 2 December, Twitter labeled multiple tweets – including one by the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s IT Cell Amit Malviya – which included an edited video clip from the ongoing farm law protests under its Synthetic and Manipulated Media policy.At the time many wondered whether this marked the start of a more interventionist role by the platform in the Indian context or if this application was a one and done.Since then, there have been at least two more instances of the application of this policy.

First, a – now deleted – tweet dated 30 August by Vivek Agnihotri was labelled (archive link) for sharing an edited clip of Joe Biden. It can certainly be debated whether this action was made in the Indian context, because of the user, or in the context of the US, because of the topic.Second, since 10 December, a number of tweets, examples of which can be seen here and here, misrepresenting sloganeering from a 2019 gathering in America as being linked to the current protests against the farm laws, have been labelled as well. This group included a tweet by Tarek Fateh. The reactions to these actions by Twitter have themselves been polarised ranging from celebratory, ‘it is about time’, ‘too little too late’ to accusations of interference in Indian politics by a ‘foreign company’.

The Repeat Super-Disinformer

Some of the accounts affected have large follower bases and high interaction rates, giving them the ability to amplify content and narratives, thus becoming ‘superspreaders.’ A Reuters Institute study on COVID-19 misinformation found that while ‘politicians, celebrities and public figures’ made up approximately 20 per cent of the false claims covered by it, these claims accounted for 80 per cent of the interactions.

They are also not first-time offenders, thus making them ‘repeat disinformers.’ It should be noted that these are also not the only accounts which routinely spread disinformation.Such behaviour can be attributed, in varying degrees, to most parts of the political spectrum and therefore it is also helpful to situate such content using the framework of ‘Dangerous Speech.’This combination creates a category of repeat super-disinformers that play an outsized role in vitiating the information ecosystem at many levels.....

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Tackling Information Disorder, the malaise of our times

This article was originally published in Deccan Herald.

The term ‘fake news’ – popularised by a certain world leader – is today used as a catch-all term for any situation in which there is a perceived or genuine falsification of facts irrespective of the intent. But the term itself lacks the nuance to differentiate between the many kinds of information operations that are common, especially on the internet.

Broadly, these can be categorized as disinformation (false content propagated with the intent to cause harm), misinformation (false content propagated without the knowledge that it is false/misleading or the intention to cause harm), and malinformation (genuine content shared with a false context and an intention to harm). Collectively, this trinity is referred to as ‘information disorder’.

Over the last 4 weeks, Facebook and Twitter have made some important announcements regarding their content moderation strategies. In January, Facebook said it was banning ‘deepfakes (videos in which a person is artificially inserted by an algorithm based on photos) on its platform. It also released additional plans for its proposed ‘Oversight Board’, which it sees as a ‘Supreme Court’ for content moderation disputes. Meanwhile, in early February, Twitter announced its new policy for dealing with manipulated media. But the question really is whether these solutions can address the problem.

Custodians of the internet

Before dissecting the finer aspects of these policies to see if they could work, it is important to unequivocally state that content moderation is hard. The conversation typically veers towards extremes: Platforms are seen to be either too lenient with harmful content or too eager when it comes to censoring ‘free expression’. The job at hand involves striking a difficult balance and it’s important to acknowledge there will always be tradeoffs.

Yet, as Tarleton Gillespie says in Custodians of the Internet, moderation is the very essence of what platforms offer. This is based on the twin-pillars of personalisation and the ‘safe harbour’ that they enjoy. The former implies that they will always tailor content for an individual user and the latter essentially grants them the discretion to choose whether a piece of content can stay up on the platform or not, without legal ramifications (except in a narrow set of special circumstances like child sex abuse material, court-orders, etc.) This of course reveals the concept of a ‘neutral’ platform for what it is, a myth. Which is why it is important to look at these policies with as critical an eye as possible.

Deepfakes and Synthetic/Manipulated Media

Let’s look at Facebook’s decision to ban ‘deepfakes’ using algorithmic detection. The move is laudable, however, this will not address the lightly edited videos that also plague the platform. Additionally, disinformation agents have modified their modus operandi to use malinformation since it is much harder to detect by algorithms. This form of information disorder is also very common in India.

Twitter’s policy goes further and aims to label/obfuscate not only deepfakes but any synthetic/manipulated media after March 5. It will also highlight and notify users that they are sharing information that has been debunked by fact-checkers. In theory, this sounds promising but determining context across geographies with varying norms will be challenging. Twitter should consider opening up flagged tweets to researchers.

The ‘Supreme Court’ of content moderation

The genesis of Facebook’s Oversight Board was a November 2018 Facebook post by Mark Zuckerberg ostensibly in response to the growing pressure on the company in the aftermath of Cambridge Analytica, the 2016 election interference revelations, and the social network’s role in aiding the spread of disinformation in Myanmar in the run-up to the Rohingya genocide. The Board will be operated by a Trust to which the company has made an irrevocable pledge of $130 million.

For now, cases will be limited to individual pieces of content that have already been taken down and can be referred in one of two ways: By Facebook itself or by individuals who have exhausted all appeals within its ecosystem (including Instagram). And while the geographical balance has been considered, for a platform that has approximately 2.5 billion monthly active users and removes nearly 12 billion pieces of content a quarter, it is hard to imagine the group being able to keep up with the barrage of cases it is likely to face.

There is also no guarantee that geographical diversity will translate to the genuine diversity required to deal with kind of nuanced cases that may come up. There is no commitment as to when the Board will also be able to look into instances where controversial content has been left online. Combined with the potential failings of its deepfakes policy to address malinformation, this will result in a tradeoff where harmful, misleading content will likely stay online.

Another area of concern is the requirement to have an account in the Facebook ecosystem to be able to refer a case. Whenever the board’s ambit expands beyond content takedown cases, this requirement will exclude individuals/groups, not on Facebook/Instagram from seeking recourse, even if they are impacted.

The elephant in the room is, of course, WhatsApp. With over 400 million users in India and support for end-to-end encryption, it is the main vehicle for information disorder operations in the country. The oft-repeated demands for weakening encryption and providing backdoors are not the solution either.

Information disorder, itself, is not new. Rumours, propaganda, and lies are as old as humanity itself and surveillance will not stop them. Social media platforms significantly increase the velocity at which this information flows thereby increasing the impact of information disorder significantly. Treating this solely as a problem for platforms to solve is equivalent to addressing a demand-side problem through exclusive supply-side measures. Until individuals start viewing new information with a healthy dose of skepticism and media organisations stop being incentivised to amplify information disorder there is little hope of addressing this issue in the short to medium term.

(Prateek Waghre is a research analyst at The Takshashila Institution)

Need to Update Competition Law

There are other major deficiencies in the competition law when it comes to understanding internet companies, Manur said. “Without establishing that a company is dominant, the CCI cannot take any action. But we haven’t clearly defined what the relevant markets are for internet companies. Are Ola and Uber the two largest cab companies? Or are they small players in a very large transportation market that included cabs, metros, trains, etc?" This is one of the defences used by internet companies—that their relevant market isn’t restricted to the internet space. For instance, Google and Facebook argue that they are small players in the larger advertising market, online and offline.As it stands, the competition law is not even equipped to detect some of the antitrust issues in the internet space, added Manur, an antitrust regulation researcher.Manur said it was imperative to add the data footprint of an internet firm as one of the metrics in considering the impact on competition. “The consumer data owned by an internet company is one of the most important indicators of its dominance and impact. In gauging M&As in the internet space this factor needs to be added to the list of considerations."Read more

The folly of breaking up Big Tech

Further, breaking up these companies would significantly reduce the value consumers get due to the high interconnectedness of the products. A lot of the value that Google has seen in the Maps platform, for instance, comes from all the data that they have from Search. Customers also receive a lot of value from other Google products that are cross-subsidised from revenue earned in other products. YouTube, for instance, is widely believed to be non-profitable but is supported by revenues earned by other products.We would also have to stop and wonder how is it that one of the most integral parts of our lives — Google Search — is provided free of cost. Google can give the service for free because it can monetise it with advertising. If Google is broken up, this would no longer be possible. Breaking up any one of these services would give us substantially less valuable services.Breaking up these technology companies would also have a severe impact on innovation in the sector. As an article in Politico points out, “The top five spenders in research and development in 2017 were all tech companies. Amazon alone spent more than $22 billion. The development of autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and voice recognition wouldn’t be nearly as advanced as they are now if it weren’t for the work of Google and Amazon”. Investing in R&D and finally introducing them into the market is an expensive ordeal. However, big tech companies can afford to do so because of the nature of interconnectedness that exist within their products...Read the entire article 

Go Easy on Amazon and Flipkart

The FDI in e-commerce policy clarifications made by the DIPP was done in order to help the small retailers from getting exploited at the hands of the big e-commerce players. While it may help them in the short run, an atmosphere that is not conducive to investment in this sector is bound to hurt them in the long run.Both Amazon and Flipkart have planned to approach the government together to reconsider these provisions. If they fail to convince the government, they will shrink the size of their future investments. This can have a significant negative effect on the entire e-commerce sector and can lead to job losses due to the closing of their private labels. Not to mention the loss of the number of jobs they would have created by their extension plans. Cities in the US are fighting with each other to provide incentives and attract Amazon’s second headquarters, while the Indian government is driving away from the investment.Finally, the decision is bound to hurt the Indian consumers. By limiting the number of discounts given by the private labels, the consumers will have to pay a higher price for their purchases. It will also reduce the variety of goods that are available to the consumers for online purchases.Vertical integration can have anti-competitive practices but can be dealt with in a far more efficient manner than outright bans on such operations. Antitrust authorities across the world have tools to recognise and prevent practices that can hurt consumers and small retailers. The competition commission can be given the mandate to develop these tools and implement them instead of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.Finally, this would also be the right time to revisit the policy of not allowing FDI in multi-brand retail. The parochial fears of potential harm to small retailers are overplayed in the public discourse. All of the small retailers in question have benefited massively from the presence of these platforms. They are now able to reach an unimaginable number of customers because of the platform. Similarly, multi-brand retail can have a massive positive effect on economic growth and job creation.Read More