The danger of fake news is real
All social media stakeholders must exercise far more caution
Twitter’s co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, is in India, engaging with both political actors and general audiences. In August, the CEO of Whatsapp, Chris Daniels, visited Delhi and engaged with the government. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has both visited India and hosted Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, at the company’s headquarters. The close engagement of leaders of some of the most revolutionary tools of communication with India is not a surprise. For these platforms, India is a huge — and growing — market. The audiences they fetch here and the various ways in which they can monetise conversations on their platforms is now an indispensable part of their global business plans.
For India, too, engaging with these platforms is essential. Take Twitter. Political leaders have found a way to communicate their views, without intermediaries. Social media supporters engage in deeply contested battles to push their narrative on all these platforms. Thanks to it, political parties have recognised how this can shape beliefs, values and electoral choices and PM Modi is understood to have told his party that 2019 will be an election fought on Whatsapp.
This is all unchartered territory, however, and the perils of these tools have already become visible. Twitter has been home to hate speech; it is witness to the most vicious trolling and targeting of public figures. On Whatsapp, fake news is a real concern. Facebook was used — and misused — in the US elections of 2016 to spread fake news; there is a danger of this happening in India as well. Along with the democratisation, there has been a degeneration of the quality of public discourse. And the platforms have been able to do little to counter hate speech and fake news. All communication technology has had unpredictable consequences in human history. While it is inevitable that Indians — and Indian politicians — will continue to tap these technologies, all stakeholders must exercise far more caution and institute more correctives than they have so far.