17 August 2020
It took Wall Street Journal to create a ripple https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346across many oceans and rock the cozy set between India’s ruling RW ecosystem and the world’s largest incorporated country- Facebook, whose global denizens are captive to her walls and views, shown in studies aftermath to have aided in electoral outcomes such as American Presidential Elections and Brexit, and now 2019 Indian Parliamentary elections as well. No one quite took Mr Derek Obrien MP of the Trinamool Party who warned in Parliament’s very floor of the threat Facebook and WhatsApp have in vitiating and influencing the electoral fortunes in India in the run up to this very landslide mandate that Mr Modi is accepted as the real author of!https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2091751077756478 His speech hosted here by an influencer on Facebook!
Actually the links exposed through an executive, her sibling inside the political RW ecosystem and the hue and cry now undertaken by INC and liberal citizens groups in India is misguided missile according to me. Even for those who feel that Facebook could do more, I did feel so in the lead up to 2014 elections, when I used to observe the narrative of ‘slighted Netaji, under threat Hindus, and India’s chance to redeem herself economically and militarily’ and was actively involved in countering these narratives with sources and facts. I sorely felt the absence of a button to mark a thread as counterfactual, as propaganda based on falsehood. Now they do have clear buttons called ‘False News’ and ‘Hate Speech’ under the link for ‘Find Support or Report Post’, which is more important than turn off notifications for a post or unfollow or block an account, which are also quite useful to screen oneself from trolling.
Actually, even if 2019 Elections were to be restrospectively analysed, we see that initially liberal folk found EVMs to be at fault, expending so much energy at their disposal, to speciously state that somehow, Mr Amit Shah and his bandwagon of electoral magicians conjured up in collusion with the CEC and SEC across India to advance the cause of the BJP at the expense of the other parties. Actually ground reports are far different, which grudgingly the same vocal liberal groups accepted in the year that followed, when a series of political decisions and mass behaviour were evidenced, not calendar year, the May to May from 2019-2020. If any one needed proof of the actual support for Mr Modi on ground, in India, you can choose the reactions from India, not just the media, or judiciary, or Parliament, but from the street level up, to his decisions including those on Kashmir, CAA, NRC and LockDown. While many view CAA and NRC opposition as evidence of civic unrest, I see them as simply an expression of opposition, of a vibrant democratic polity. Where I have issues with these movements is how popular media and the police acted on these in the garb of their being ‘anti national’ in nature, crushing them with an overload of narrative dominance and heavy footed police action, including the storming of a student library of an University and of course the invasion of several girls hostels at night by police and ‘non state actors’ like the ABVP activists caught on CCTV footage, against whom judicial hearings are on, but no FIRs have been registered by the State. The Delhi riots too are viewed by me as fault lines emerging from this narrative control that the RW Hindutva groups are seeking and the Left -Muslim segments are attempting to thwart. Here too, more than Facebook or Twitter, which actually aided the cause of liberals and the ‘secularists’ like Kharwan e Mohabbat, by allowing individual handles to post videos and imagery from the edge of street scuffles and citizen-police skirmishes in Delhi’s streets, it was the notable worthies of Television who led the narrative of how only Muslims, and their sympathisers were responsible for the violence and the Delhi Police was actually at its wits end in retaking the streets. So like Kashmir post 5 August 2019, where the NSA went to have tea and snacks with locals, here too, we saw him hit the streets with a posse of policemen to re-establish a connect with these sensitive mohallas and pacify them. Then came Covid19.
What I have surprisingly found is more energetic action from individual handles on Twitter, a social media where lot of RW handles apparently have moved from, and even Facebook appears muted, and most importantly the poisonous and blatantly false WhatsApp forwards have been fewer and now find them fact-checked in the groups where earlier I was the lone fact checking agent. I can say with a sense of surprise that elders too know a trick or two about fact checking these days. Also, in the face of the Chinese presence in Eastern Ladakh and the relentless rise in Petroleum prices, and in absence of much opposition except from Mr Rahul Gandhi’s corner, the social media has come alive with the use of tweets which are blasts from the past! So CM Modi is the most favourite to quote against PM Modi, followed by Activist Smriti Irani and Kiran Bedi against Minister Irani and Lt Governor Bedi, and in this trail of validation, even the venerable Rajnath Singhji of ‘Kadi ninda’ is not spared, quoted his own videos then to his current spare comments as Defence Minister! The same is happening in these very platforms, Twitter and Facebook. A rookie MP like Tejaswi Surya has been forced to the backfoot when his tweets were used to highlight RW tweets when a influential member of the UAE Royals started targeting Indians in UAE for their Islamophobic comments. Many like him who cleaned up their comments by deleting tweets and posts, ended up facing a barrage of screen shots that highlighted their venality far more than before they had deleted those offending posts. The atmosphere on Social Media is far different now, after the EU hearings and US Congressional hearings on ‘Trust’ against the Tech biggies, prominently against Mark Zuckerberg! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/29/tech-hearings-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-amazon-jeff-bezos-apple-tim-cook-google-sundar-pichai-congressAnd if the current electoral opinion polls hold up and the Democrats come to dominate both Senate and House of Representatives, I expect that US based social media will actually be a bigger boost for the liberal outlook and an ally to ‘secular’ forces than any other, particularly in the face of how captive and captured Indian mainstream media is!
So I am wondering if this current outcry against Facebook is being orchestrated to ensure some curbs on it are placed as a medium in India and by extension on Twitter, so that in the meanwhile WeChat and TikTok which President Trump wants to have local ownership by a deadline, along the lines of ownership stipulations for media houses in the USA, will automatically convert to local Indian ownership of these media which would be probably an Ambani or Adani ( used as an euphemism for an acolyte of the ruling party, a crony capitalist) who would be a front for BJP or some political arm of the Sangh Parivar to operating these influential platforms, which would create ‘echo systems pitch perfect and picture perfect for the Right Wing for 2024! So I hope all the liberals out there, and political opposition to the BJP realise that Facebook is going to be their ally, and not slay it with domestic legislation which will deprive them of a ‘established and savvy platform’ for their campaigns with such a vast reach. For any legislation that prohibits Facebook from relaying political, cultural or historical content of ‘disputed’ nature, would be detrimental to fact checking and liberal forces who now are with the upper hand across the globe, especially in the face of this Pandemic where Facebook https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/16/facebook-fake-news-coronavirus-190054itself is undertaking an initiative about informing its users about the veracity of content hosted on its platform! Imagine credibility loss suffered by ‘blue ticked handles’ and political handles is a compounding interest return, and with each passing day, the posts hosted by them is far easier to discredit. Conversely, now in these monsoons, images shared and clips of flooding hosted by known INC handles turned out to be not of Delhi but elsewhere, yet, these enjoyed a rebound after being fact checked and denounced, showing a reverse or perverse logic of just a mob mentality throwing mud, hoping some of it will stick on Mr Arvind Kejriwal! So actually preserving this executive who liaises with the ruling party and aids their propaganda could come in handy when the fortunes of the opposition changes, as it did with Rajasthan Assembly, and could be the force multiplier the liberal left ecosystem need to make their case for their version of India as opposed to the current flavour of über-nationalism, Hindu Revivalism and Cultural Conservatism. After all in a democracy, the tide will turn, and the ingredients of anti incumbency are always adding on, piling up for Mr Modi, now the longest serving non INC Premier India has had in her seven decades as a Democratic Republic! Imagine how easy it would be for say, the INC to rehabilitate ‘Pappu’ Rahul as ‘Prophet’ Rahul, with this atmosphere of pliant and manipulative platforms, beyond it just being Karma?
What I keep repeating is this…At the end these virtual platforms are simply extensions of our reality and not the other way round. Whether it is Trump supporters in USA or ‘Bhakts’ in India and USA, UK, Germany, Australia amongst other places globally, it is because they found these platforms amplifying their conspiracy theories and their prejudices that they flocked to it and overwhelmed it. If some forces were employing ‘bots’ then they were merely creating an illusion which will crash when it contacts reality. If the ground was not shifting how would the INC have managed to hold on to Rajasthan, the single biggest example I have to counter all those who point fingers at TV Studios, media and social media for pummelling the INC politically. For there is only so much even a Goebbels could do, once the reality on ground changed, and no one blames him for the rise of Nazis which was because of real political conditions then prevailing in Germany after the Treaty of Versailles! So if Mr Modi’s Independence Day Speech was being ‘fact checked’ minute by minute, his long winding delivery was subject to panning on social media, this is happening on the same Twitter and Facebook where once there was only fandom of Mr Modi and a hysterical crescendo of hosannahs for him!
So please back off, focus on real issues. There are enough checks and balances, and we can all follow the Finland model of teaching the next generation to discern between science and scientism, between propaganda and political discourse, between Truth and Untruth.
indiarubberman.com 