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. 

How India and Israel can lead the way on 5G collaboration

Despite the evident opportunities, 5G deployment globally hasn’t been without challenges. Superpower competition, costly infrastructure, and slow application development are holding back development. India and Israel can, together, leverage their strengths to collaborate in areas such application development, building networks of trust, and future research and development and unleash the possibilities of 5G for their citizens.Read the full article in Hindustan Times.

Killing the Slow Brain

This article was originally published in OPEN magazine.The proliferation of social media presents a clear danger to liberal democracy, free markets, political order and, indeed, to human civilisation. The threat is greater and more urgent than that presented by climate change, Artificial Intelligence, nuclear war, pandemics and terrorism. While we recognise many of the latter as constituting global threats and are aware of how to address them (even if we find it difficult to do so in practice), public opinion around the world is yet to fully recognise that not only is social media a threat to society, but also that the threat is existential in nature.To be sure, the rose-tinted view of the internet and social media that we entertained in the mid-2000s has given way to greater skepticism as the downsides of global interpersonal connectivity have come to fore. Techno-pessimism has grown as societies deal with diverse problems ranging from cyberbullying to surveillance capitalism, from internet-enabled terrorism to foreign interference in electoral politics. If the threat from social media and transnational technology platforms over which they run were limited to problems such as these, it would have been relatively easier for the world’s governments and societies to manage. The problem, unfortunately, is of a vastly different nature.For now, let us set aside the economic challenges, such as taxing digital transactions in a multi-crossborder setting and controversial business models employed by global tech platforms. Let us focus on the sociopolitical ones as they are more important.We confront these challenges at three levels. First, while popular attention is mostly focused on controversies around free speech and privacy, these are actually superficial in nature. More serious is the underlying second level, involving political power that technology platforms have come to wield through their ability to shape international and national narratives, to micro-target and influence human behaviour. But most serious of all is the third, deepest level concerning the effect of social media on how we process information, how we think and how we make judgements.Today, we are intensely caught up at the first level, amid passionate debates concerning online free speech. The debate here is about who should govern what is expressed on the platform; private corporations, national governments or civil societies. In the US, this debate centres around whether social media companies are publications that exercise editorial choice or platforms that do not. The companies have long enjoyed the protections of the latter and escaped legal responsibility for the content that is expressed on their networks. After all, unlike newspapers or television companies, they do not have editors deciding what gets published or broadcast. Yet, their claims to being mere platforms are questionable because even if they do not have human editors making decisions, they do employ computer algorithms that determine what users see. What you see on a Google search, Facebook feed or Twitter stream is neither random nor reverse-chronological. It is algorithmic. So if lawmakers in the US want to review the statute that treats them as platforms, they have a case. Meanwhile, Europe has long had rules prohibiting hate speech, which it seeks to impose more strongly on big tech companies that conveniently happen to be mostly American. In India, governments have long taken an elastic view of the constitutional restrictions on free speech, succumbing either to competitive intolerance or political partisanship. Indeed, one of the grounds for demanding that content be taken down under the Information Technology Act, 2000 is the bewildering offence of ‘blasphemy’ which is absurd in a secular state and ought to be unconstitutional. Yet, it remains on the books. In other words, whether it is in the US, Europe or India, governments are attempting to seize greater control over gatekeeping content from technology platforms. This is a battle that governments will eventually win. They will also win the battle over privacy norms.The world’s more deliberative political systems are paying greater attention to the second level issue: how to deal with the political power that tech platforms have come to acquire. Even if their ability to make or break political careers is overestimated, their extraordinary ability to shape the public narrative is no longer in doubt. The world’s nation-states, shaped as they were by the Industrial Age, lack effective mechanisms to deal with this new power centre. The old formula of separating legislative, judiciary, executive, monetary and religious authorities, and ensuring that the media is free and there is competition in the economy, does not work satisfactorily in the Information Age. Lacking suitable instruments, the world’s lawmakers are using what they have—anti-trust laws—to literally cut big technology firms down to size. A far more effective way would be to curb the narrative dominance of tech companies by compelling them to open up their platforms to competing algorithm providers. Even so, the broader task of accommodating information power centres and rebalancing power among social institutions is a task that all countries face.IT IS AT the third and deepest level that we confront the most serious threat from social media, because it hijacks our ability to think. Addictive and relentless, social media interferes with our ability to use the reflective, rational part of the mind—what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the ‘slow brain’—and instead makes us leap from one instinctive reaction to the other. Instead of making our own judgements, we rely on social proof, ‘what others say’, even if it contradicts our own lived experience. We do not reflect. Indeed, we cannot reflect because the feed has refreshed and we must respond quickly. There is no time to reason. Yet, liberal democracy and free markets are based on the human capacity for reason. Take that away and the edifice of society stands on much weaker legs. It is not a coincidence that liberal democracies around the world have seen a weakening of liberal norms, the rise of demagogues and ceaseless moral panics over the past decade. The Right is currently not too concerned about this—and often celebrates it—as it is reaping the political benefits of the phenomenon. This is myopic. Nationalists, conservatives and traditionalists must be concerned too, for the whirlwind of unreason will not spare any political or social order. Liberal democratic order is merely the first victim. Social media undermines order itself and will not distinguish one form from the other. It is rapidly eating away at the cognitive machinery of humankind, at our capacity to think and use our better judgement. This is a path that leads to anarchy, authoritarianism or both. So even authoritarians cannot rest easy.We have no idea how to stop this slide. The world is getting more connected, data is getting cheaper, video is replacing text and literacy is no longer a hurdle. But we do not know how to get off the smartphone, nor, indeed, how to get our kids off it.The world’s governments will find that it is easier to sort out who gets to control free speech on the internet, and even to accommodate tech platforms into democratic power structures, than it is to unlock the stranglehold social media has over the human mind. As individuals, we can start acting now.

The race to map the ocean deep

India is falling behind efforts to map the undersea environment of the Indo-Pacific regionMajor powers are investing time and money deploying UUVs in these waters because of the valuable oceanographic and hydrographic data they provide. Oceanography is the study of the physical and biological aspects of the oceans. Hydrography is the process by which the ocean bed is surveyed and navigation aids and charts are produced, providing ships the maritime equivalent of roadmaps and road signs.Oceanography and hydrography have clear civilian applications: scientific research into climate and marine ecology, surveying the ocean floors to ensure safer navigation of merchant vessels, and collecting information for oil and gas or other seabed mining activities.However, there are also equally clear naval applications: Hydrographic data ease the movement of naval surface ships. More important, they provide crucial information for submarines and for those tasked with hunting them. Over the coming years, the study of the oceans and the seabed is likely to become a source of power and influence in the Indo-Pacific region.Read the full article on Asia Times

What we must regulate when we regulate social media platforms

The global debate over how to govern Big Tech has intensified after Twitter, Facebook, Alphabet and Amazon de-platformed former US President Donald Trump and some of his supporters in the wake of the mob raid on the US Capitol on 6 January. Clearly, transnational technology platforms not only influence politics and markets through actions of users they don’t control, but directly wield political power themselves. Human society has yet to completely adjust to these new power centres of the Information Age, and all states—from autocracies to liberal democracies—are in their own ways contending with the challenges of how to limit, constrain, regulate and harness them.Read the full article in The Mint

Signalling a Race against Time

This article was first published in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.As a child of the nineties, I have had the privilege of watching the internet evolve over the ages. I remember rushing back from school and throwing away my bag to switch on the computer and the internet. Back in the day, you had to fire up the internet through a landline connection. And while you were online, if someone wanted to use the landline, the internet connection would be disrupted. But boy was all of it worth it. I would have gone anywhere on the internet (but mostly stayed at Orkut) to chat with my friends.‘Network effects’ made Orkut the place for me, just as they make social media apps like WhatsApp popular today. The basic idea behind network effects is that you are on WhatsApp because your friends are on it, and your friends are on it because their friends (and you) are on it. It’s a simple principle and one that is likely going to be the downfall of Signal.

Decoding the Signals Surrounding Signal’s Success

The defining feature of 21st-century innovation has been the reduction of friction.The most successful companies of our times – Google, Facebook, Uber, and so on – follow what economists David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee call the “Matchmaker” business model. These companies make their money by making it easier for one group of people to connect with another group of people almost effortlessly. Uber, for instance, makes it easy for cab drivers and cab riders to find each other, a job that has historically caused great frustration, as anyone who has attempted to hail an auto in Bengaluru in the old-fashioned, “wave-your-hands-frantically-as-if-you-are-drowning” way can attest.Read the full article in The Wire

The big convergence challenge that we face in this new decade

We enter the third decade of this millennium amid rising doubts, risks and worries about technology, markets, nationalism, democracy and the world order. The unqualified enthusiasm for them that we saw in the past two decades has given way to concerns about what their right dosage is, and what, if any, are the antidotes should we have willy-nilly overdosed on any of them. This is good. Societies that try to answer them truthfully and thoughtfully can expect to emerge stronger and more successful in 2030. For public policy, as for investors and value creators, the opportunities and risks lie at the intersection of technology, health, society and geopolitics.Read the full article in The Mint

Amazon, Facebook, Google and the question of trust

In the season of Secret Santa, and last-minute Christmas shopping or new year’s gifts, the option of shopping with e-commerce is a godsend.

Read the full article on Mumbai Mirror

The Next Step for Quad: A Dialogue on High Tech

This article was first published in Hindustan Times. Views are personal.T-12 is the new G-7. We are not talking about your airport boarding gates. T-12, Tech-10, Democracy-10 are some proposed multilateral mechanisms to enable international cooperation in technology governance.Cooperation, however, won’t be easy because there is significant dissonance even amongst democracies on issues such as competition in the digital economy, privacy, and data governance. The European Union (EU) prefers a regulation-heavy approach centred on protecting users’ data; the United States (US) prefers a less-restrictive approach allowing technology companies to gain scale; and India is considering data localisation measures. Such divergent outlooks run the risk of derailing collaboration.

India Needs a More Transparent Approach To Space Situational Awareness

The recent, barely avoided collision between India’s Cartosat 2F and Russia’s Kanopus V satellites highlights the need for transparent space situational awareness (SSA) in India.Information about the close call only became public after a tweet by Roscosmos – the Russian state space corporation – that went into specifics about the incident. The response of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s chairman K. Sivan makes it clear that India does not publicly discuss such events, and resolves them by coordinating with other space agencies.Read the full article in The Wire

Novel platform regulation ideas government can adopt

In early November 2020, the Union Government passed a notification stating that news and current affairs content on online platforms would be brought under the jurisdiction and control of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B ministry). This means that the I&B ministry will moderate content on intermediaries, such as social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter), blogging platforms, video hosting platforms (YouTube). At the time, this raised concerns within civil society.This seems like a bad omen for the freedom of speech, expression and the open internet. However, while those concerns may be justified, there has been little talk around the nuts and bolts of what this change might have in store for content on the internet. There is an ambiguous line between regulation and over-regulation in this space, and no policy solution is going to send everyone home happy. Keeping that in mind, it is worth looking at some novel measures the I&B ministry may consider and how they might play out.You can read the full piece in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.This article was written by Nirali Trivedi, student of the GCPP (Tech and Policy) Programme and Rohan Seth, policy analyst, technology. 

The wrong way to regulate disinformation

This article originally appeared in Deccan Herald.

When the Kerala Governor signed a controversial Ordinance, now withdrawn, proposing amendments to the Kerala Police Act, there was understandably a significant amount of criticism and ire directed at the state government for a provision that warranted a three-year jail term for intentionally and falsely defaming a person or a group of people. After the backlash, the state’s Chief Minister announced his intention not to implement the fresh amendment.

How not to regulate information disorderFor anyone tracking the information ecosystem and how different levels of state administration are responding to information disorder (misinformation, disinformation and malinformation) this attempted overreach is not surprising. In Kerala alone, over the last few months, we have witnessed accusations from the opposition of ‘Trump-ian’ behaviour on the part of the state administration to decry any unflattering information as ‘fake news’. Even in September, the Chief Minister had to assure people that measures to curb information disorder will not affect media freedom, after pushback against decisions to expand fact-checking initiatives beyond Covid-19 related news. In October, it was reported that over 200 cases were filed for ‘fake news’ in the preceding five months.Of course, this is by no means limited to one state, or a particular part of the political spectrum. Across the country, there have been measures such as banning social media news platforms, notifications/warnings to WhatsApp admins, a PIL seeking Aadhaar linking to social media accounts, as well as recommendations to the Union Home Minister for ‘real-time social media monitoring’. Arrests/FIRs against journalists and private citizens for ‘fake news’ and ‘rumour-mongering’ have taken place in several states.How to regulate information disorder?Before proceeding to ‘the how’, it is important to consider two fundamental questions when it comes to the topic of regulating disinformation. First, should we? Four or five years ago, many people would have said no. Yet, today, many people will probably say yes. What will we say in the four or five years from now? We don’t know. ...For the complete article, go here.

What we don't talk about when we talk about 'Big Tech'

While the world speculates what a Biden administration is likely to look like, those in the technology space, including journalists and researchers, seem to agree that the severe scrutiny of ‘Big Tech’ companies, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, is likely to continue. As veteran Silicon Valley journalist Casey Newton asserts on the Ezra Klein Show, a heavy-handed approach to regulating Big Tech, through severe antitrust enforcement, enjoys bipartisan support in the US.Read the full article in Deccan Herald

Nations are hurting themselves in their big fight with Big Tech

This article was originally published in Live Mint. Views are Personal.

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In a recent interview with The Atlantic magazine, Barack Obama described social media as “the single biggest threat to our democracy", arguing that these platforms had destroyed the common narrative necessary for democracy to function. He held tech companies partly responsible, contending that, “The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable." In the ongoing debate on whether social media companies are platforms or publications, the former US president holds that these companies “are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not" and they can’t cite free speech “to provide a platform for any view that is out there". In his opinion, tackling this challenge to democracy would require both government regulation and changes in the way these companies operate.Read More

Can the professor be stopped in India?

This article was first published in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.If you binge-watch one show this year, let it be Money Heist. I started (and finished) the crime drama last week and have to say my favourite bits were the phone calls between the Professor and the Spanish law enforcement. In case you don’t know what I am talking about, there is a gang of thieves inside the Spanish Mint with hostages. Their leader (a man called ‘The Professor’) is on the outside, strategising and coordinating things and has to talk to the police ever so often. 

China’s Semiconductor Gold Rush: A Reality Check

The semiconductor industry has become a major front in the US-China tech war. Given that this is a weak link in China’s otherwise impressive technology stack, the US has imposed export controls restricting Chinese semiconductor companies from accessing key equipment, software, and intellectual property.This article was first published in the South China Morning Post. Views are personal. Read more here.

Flawed regulation can undermine the digital payment ecosystem

Anupam Manur writes in Hindustan Times on why the limits placed on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions for third-party apps by NPCI is flawed.Systemic risks are automatically lower when consumers, merchants, and third-party app developers are all multi-homing, meaning they simultaneously use more than one app for the same purpose. The UPI ecosystem is radically substitutable. In the case of failure, consumers and merchants can switch from one app to another without the slightest friction. Though two apps, PhonePe and GPay, dominate the UPI market (with roughly 80% of UPI transactions), consumers are not without choice — there are at least 52 UPI service providers, 189 issuers and around 21 third-party apps. Third-party app developers also can and do have tie-ups with multiple banks simultaneously, such that the YES bank-PhonePe fiasco will not be repeated.Beyond being unnecessary, the rule is also improper, incomplete, and inconsistent. If the aim is to mitigate the systemic risk of failure of one big market player, the rule change should apply to all apps providing UPI services, and not just third-party apps. Is the systemic risk different when the app of a scheduled commercial bank fails as against a third-party app?The entire article can be accessed here

Future-Reliance saga has a scary message: If Amazon can't enforce a contract, who can?

This story was first published in The Economic Times. Views are personal.

In case you have not been paying attention, the pandemic has had a transformative impact on the future of Indian retail and e-commerce. Earlier in October, Kishore Biyani admitted that the pandemic had led to his company, ‘Future Group’, losing ₹7000 crores in 3-4 months. Rent and interest on properties like Big Bazaar had not stopped, while sales had taken a direct hit.

While Future Group was struggling with the impact of the pandemic, Reliance was looking to grow. This year, Jio Platforms attracted high-profile investments from amongst others, Facebook and Google. Similarly, Reliance Retail was looking to expand. Between September to October, Reliance Retail raised ₹37,000 crores from over eight investments. Also, there were reports that Amazon had been planning to acquire a significant stake in Reliance Retail for about $20 billion. In late August, Reliance announced the acquisition of Future Group for ₹24,713 crores.