Facebook Says It Inadvertently Restricted A Hashtag. Now It Needs To Tell Us Exactly How And Why

This article originally appeared on Medianama. An excerpt is reproduced here:

An explanation

The presence of a political context surrounding these cases also raises the question of how Facebook is responding to the possible weaponisation of its community reporting. We know from Facebook’s August 2020 CIB report that it took against a network engaged in mass reporting. What principles does it use to define thresholds for action? How is such coordinated activity that falls below its self-defined threshold of Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour handled? Knowledge about the specifics of thresholds become essential when they make the difference between publicly disclosed and internal actions, as the Sophie Zhang – Guardian series demonstrated in the Indian context.Facebook — this applies to other networks too, but Facebook is by far the largest in India — needs to put forward more meaningful explanations in such cases. Ones that amount to more than ‘Oops!’ or ‘Look! We fixed it!’. There are, after all, no secret blocking rules stopping it from explaining its own mistakes. These explanations don’t have to be immediate. Issues can be complex, requiring detailed analysis. Set a definite timeline, and deliver. No doubt, this already happens for internal purposes. And then, actually show progress. Reduce the trust deficit, don’t feed it.This does raise concerns of being drawn into distracted by narrow content-specific conversations or being distracted by ‘transparency theater’, thereby missing the forest for the trees. These are legitimate risks and need to be navigated carefully. The micro-level focus can be about specific types of content or actions on a particular platform. At the macro-level, it is about impact on public discourse and society. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive and what we learn from one level should inform the others, in pursuit of greater accountability. To read more visit: Facebook says it inadvertently restricted a hashtag. Now it needs to tell us exactly how and why | MediaNama

It’s Not Just About 50 Tweets and One Platform

This article originally appeared in TheWire. An excerpt is reproduced here.Transparency and a voluntary actThis latest attempt came to light because Twitter disclosed this action in the Lumen Database, a project that houses voluntary submissions. And while Twitter is being criticised for complying, reports suggest that the company wasn’t the only one that received such a request. It just happened to be the only one that chose to disclose it proactively.Expanding on legal scholar Jack Balkin’s model for speech regulation, there are ‘3C’s’ available (cooperation, cooption and confrontation) for companies in their interaction with state power. Apart from Twitter’s seemingly short-lived dalliance with confrontation in February 2021, technology platforms have mostly chosen the cooperation and cooption options in India (in contrast to their posturing in the west).This is particularly evident in their reaction to the recent Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code. We’ll ask for transparency, but what we’re likely to get is ‘transparency theatre’ – ranging from inscrutable reports, to a deluge of information which, as communications scholar Sun-ha Hong argues, ‘won’t save us’.Reports allege that the most recent Twitter posts were flagged because they were misleading. But, at the time of writing, it isn’t clear exactly which law(s) were allegedly violated. We can demand that social media platforms are more transparent, but the current legal regime dealing with ‘blocking’ (Section 69A of the IT ACT) place no such obligations on the government. On the contrary, as  lawyers Gurshabad Grover and Torsha Sorkar point out, it enables them to issue ‘secret blocking’ orders. Civil society groups have advocated against these provisions, but the political class (whether in government or opposition) is yet to make any serious attempts to change the status quo.