HOW FACEBOOK MAKES MONEY

Facebook makes most of its money by customising ads. Advertisers pay Facebook to make their ads visible to potential customers. Facebook does not share data of users with advertisers. Instead it does a profiling of users as per the requirements of advertisers. Most ads are ‘pay per click’, i.e. advertisers pay Facebook each time a person clicks on an ad. Social media experts say discord, outrage and polarisation increase users’ time spend on social media, which results in viewing more ads. As WhatsApp doesn’t earn any significant revenue, industry insiders speculate that Facebook acquired the messenger app to access more intimate behavioural data and personal information of a large base of users. Facebook also makes money by selling virtual reality headset Oculus. It is expanding into services like online payments, e-commerce and business messaging.

India has witnessed mob lynchings and communal violence incited by fake news or hate messages on WhatsApp, Facebook and other networks, and the platforms have been found wanting in action.

Such reluctance seems to be mostly driven by commercial interest. Most social media platforms depend on ads for revenue. Most ads are ‘pay per click’, meaning advertisers pay the platform each time a person clicks on their ads. This makes the duration of user engagement crucial. Digital communication experts say discord, outrage and polarisation evoke intense emotions in users, increasing the time they spend on social media. “Social media platforms have changed their algorithm to increase the engagement of users. Those who have cracked the algorithm post and distribute content that is likely to go viral, drawing the attention of unsuspecting masses,” says Raj Padhiyar, founder and CEO of Digital Gurukul. “Social media psychology suggests people respond more to content that evokes extreme emotions.” Mohan, however, disagrees. “It’s not good for us, not for people on the platform. There is no constituency that benefits from hate speech,” he said in the interview to TOI.

As users’ engagement increases, the platform has more time to serve ads customised to their online behaviour and personal data. This monopoly over personal details, thought process and political affiliation not only makes social media platforms a powerful tool for targeted communication but also helps them analyse and predict people’s behaviour. Even publicly available data is being mined, as seen in a recent expose by The Indian Express, which claimed that a Chinese company, with links to the Chinese government and the Communist Party of China, had been monitoring the social media activities of influential individuals and organisations globally, including 10,000 from India. The activity was part of “hybrid warfare” to achieve dominance through “information pollution, perception management and propaganda”.

Political parties exploit social media platforms because of their power to set the agenda based on the data derivatives they possess. Networks, on the other hand, seek out political parties as they bring in a large army of workers who can automatically enhance user base and engagement traffic, making the platforms attractive for advertisers.

Through demographic and psychographic targeting on these platforms, political parties can bombard the electorate with messages, often without much accountability. The platforms help by creating echo chambers. They flood the timelines of people with content that reinforces their beliefs and cuts out contrarian views. “A vast majority of social media users have no idea they are not consuming content of their choice but what the algorithm of the platform has decided to serve, based on their online behaviour and profile,” says Osama Manzar, founder-director of Digital Empowerment Foundation, New Delhi.

In India, the power and reach of social media has perhaps been tapped best by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Over the years, a well-crafted social media strategy has built an impregnable public image of the prime minister, which played a key role in his two consecutive Lok Sabha election victories. In the 2019 election, while the country was grappling with economic and job crises, a hyper-nationalistic social media narrative built around India’s Balakot airstrike, in response to the Pulwama terror attack, helped Modi get an even bigger mandate than in 2014.

The power of social media to mould public opinion was evident again when Modi insulated himself from all criticism of his government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. “We did an ethnographic study of 150,000 migrants from four states who had suffered due to the Covid lockdown. They complained about food shortage, their employers, police atrocities and state governments, but not one spoke against PM Modi or the

central government,” says Manzar.

Unfortunately, the biggest tool of the engagement-enhancing algorithm in social media engines has been abuse, particularly in the echo chambers where opposition is often blighted by falsehoods. It inflames social and communal tensions, creating an environment for the growth of far-right regimes across the world. “Social media is designed to facilitate an ephemeral engagement of ‘click and forward’ rather than a sustained and critical one. This type of communicative grammar—termed as epideictic rhetoric—facilitates groupthink, confirmation bias and echo chambers, which impede democratic will formation. It is no accident, therefore, that the age of social media has also seen the rise of authoritarian populism,” say Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami of IT for Change, a Bengaluru-based NGO.

A study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, examining about 126,000 stories shared by some 3 million people on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, suggests that fake news was about 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than factual news. Though Twitter’s allowance of bots has come under particular criticism, the MIT researchers found that these automated accounts accelerated true and fake news equally. A 2018 study in the journal Natural Hazards said less than 10 per cent of Twitter users questioned fake news. “Misinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories create a sense of aggressive arousal in the minds of consumers, diminishing their rational thinking,” says eminent psychiatrist Dr Samir Parikh. “They get pulled into the false narrative, which gets ampli