11 August 2021
When President Trump’s account was suspended by Twitter, many lustily cheered, for the excesses of a false narrative that had such follower-ship needed taking down was the logic. Many argued, however that Twitter had no ombudsman, there was no natural justice in how the measure was undertaken, including a clearly one sided dealing, even if the person was the POTUS. Arguably many felt comfortable to use a Facebook like system, where the matter is adjudicated by a screening committee, with a mechanism of review attached, though the outcome for Mr Trump was no different on Facebook than it was on Twitter. From his own efforts to write a blog of sorts, which he wound up subsequently, to his efforts that are on going to rally his base with rallies, this much even core Trump supporters admit is not a patch on the original salience that he enjoyed while having handles on Twitter and Facebook. An entire ecosystem of trolls, revisionists, conspiracists and supremacists, including the White Supremacists, QAnon Conspiracists and Corona Conspiracists, actually thrive on such social media platforms, even though their greatest living idol was desecrated and denied on their watch!
So we now see an entity like a social media platform, which by itself can behave like a country, expelling some, suspending others and all this is based on its own predatory perversion operating under what it calls- ‘rules’! There is just one scintillating episode that is available on popular Cable TV and now increasingly ubiquitous app based programming which showcases serials, movies, shows and has become a unique way of how humans now consume entertainment! That is a show I watched all seasons- Madam Secretary. I can just replay the episode 6 of season 6 that starts around a crises created by a deep fake video that shows the President and her husband Dr McCord are dissing the Koreans over their trade deal with the US, which leads to the Korean President wanting to fall out. The episode aptly titled ‘Deep Fake’ illustrates how easy it is to use modern AI and Machine learning to undertake image manipulation. So in a series of counter measures, what turns out to be the clincher is how President McCord convinces the CEO of YoureVid to actually act on deep fake, one which I would attribute to the license that a script writer has, even while adhering largely to reality.
So the familiar defence of social media platforms is how they are merely platforms and not publishing houses. May be the reason why Facebook finally agreed to pay for content from News Media in Australia first, now similar provisions are coming up in EU as well. However, the second logic is just humongous nature of the work involved with too much content getting hosted with too few people monitoring, too broad based algorithmic filtering and thus mostly content will get a free pass. Then there is a third, that if the countries want to shut down a particular content, it must be covered by the law of that country. So technically, the system operates as a global platform and yet it can create silos, like you get those notices on Twitter, which say that ‘content from this handle are restricted for viewing in the host country’.
But as the serial notes, the algorithms that hook you on to deep fakes exist. They create clear connections, even if you accidentally watched one, so that others keep popping up. Soon, in a matter of hours, you could descend into alternate to reality. ( I quite get agitated when the phrase ‘alternate reality’ is used. Being a seeker, Siddha/Upanishadic in mooring, I fail to understand how, there could be alternate to reality that could be accepted as reality.) So the conclusion drawn from the episode is that in reality the entire polity, the free media and the public need to have a stake to fix this mess.
Why suddenly this comes back to me is how today Swiss Embassy has gone to extraordinary lengths to declaim a digital identity as a Facebook account, being a Swiss national. One which apparently was opened very recently and followed by merely three other accounts and one that Chinese media platforms that are deeply censored became aware of and agog with comments and trends! This as a foreign policy moment is a first, in real world, where one country actually as a sovereign is directly appealing to the people of another country through mass media and claiming that a person of interest who was claimed to be its citizen, was a deep fake.
So how does one handle social media then? We can say today the big guns are all US based companies, with the exception of say TikTok. However, if Indian versions of Twitter or Facebook take off, tomorrow it could be more of a global thing. One of the ways the Biden administration has been handling Big Tech’s outsized policy muscle is the masterstroke of enforcing a minimum taxation on Big Tech as a global tax, which would be then distributed based on percentage revenue generated across individual countries. So a more rational way of looking at bringing Big Tech to heel or heal, is to create a global convention that allowed two simple tweaks. The first would allow users to label any content as False/Fake and also classify content as Political or Ideological or Religious. So any other person accessing the content will know of such classification and gravitate accordingly. The second should be a algorithmic tweak that would allow one view to be followed up by an alternate view, so that any content reviewer can get ‘both sides of the argument’ in equal measure. The simplicity of a label and the equilibrium of offering in equal measure an alternate view, is all that it would take, to temper social media. Since the platforms claim that they are not publishers, why must they regulate or editorialise the content generated? In the interest of truth and narrative balance, just the two means suggested as measures at the level of the medium would offset any parochial narrative compulsion.
Today, it was just a Swiss citizen, and mark me, more like a trial balloon. Tomorrow, could it be a Taiwanese, Australian, Indian or even American, and whip such a frenzy that would dovetail into a plan of aggressive and ever spiralling military posture, putting paid to decades of diplomatic back and forth, fleet manoeuvring and multilateral organisational goodwill as obtained from United Nations. Can social media have such power? Why could not Facebook step in and hastily confirm to the world and the Chinese in particular, the antecedents of this mischief maker? How can you allow what appears to be a democratic thing, a liberal cause, which is ‘freedom of expression’ to derail what is actually democracy- a free exchange of ideas and consensus by debate and deliberation? Is it not like a filibuster, a provision the US Congress employs, which has no basis in law, but which continues to haunt legislative efforts in the US Senate?
indiarubberman.com 