HOW TWITTER MAKES MONEY

Twitter generates revenue by selling promoted products, including tweets, accounts and trends to advertisers. The company creates tailored advertising opportunities by using an algorithm to make sure promoted products make it to the right users’ timelines, ‘Who to Follow’ lists or the list of trending topics. Advertisers also have the option of paying for in-stream video ads delivered to a targeted audience or sponsoring video content from publishing partners. Twitter’s data licensing business sells millions of tweets to various companies, which are looking to access, search and analyse historical and real-time data on the platform to decipher consumer trends. Other revenue sources include service fees that Twitter collects from users of its mobile ad exchange, MoPub.

fied as they share such twisted information. Most factual information does not have that ‘arousing’ quotient and that’s why it travels slowly on social media.”

FAKE NEWS AS A POLITICAL TOOL

India’s growing digital landscape has multiplied the spread of misinformation. The country’s internet population grew 108 per cent, from 250 million in 2014, when the BJP came to power at the Centre, to 520 million in 2019. This April, Facebook announced it was spending $5.7 billion (around Rs 43,000 crore)—its biggest foreign investment yet—to pick up a 9.99 per cent stake in Reliance Jio, which has 388 million subscribers. With Jio rolling out cheap internet packs and smartphones in 2017, WhatsApp, which was bought by Facebook in 2014, emerged as the most powerful arsenal for creating a narrative. “Fake news became a weapon of mass conversion for political parties and the targets were people with low digital literacy and those prone to biases,” says Pankaj Jain, founder of SM Hoax Slayer, a factchecking digital platform.

As competition among political groups increased, the social media space became more vicious. New tricks were deployed—from buying bots to hiring social media influencers and digital marketing companies. Huge amounts are now spent on ‘content armies’, such as influencers and WhatsApp group administrators. In 2019, a study by Oxford researchers found that over a quarter of the content shared by the BJP and a fifth of that shared by the Congress was junk. A third of the BJP’s and a quarter of the Congress’s visual content on WhatsApp was catalogued as divisive and conspiratorial. “Just as popular will in a democracy shouldn’t be distorted by using illegal means, democratic expression on social media shouldn’t be interfered with using bots or other unethical means,” Ram Madhav, the BJP’s national general secretary, observes, sagely.

However, it’s difficult to legally pin such activities on political parties as most of this is done through proxies. For instance, between February 2019 and September 5 this year, Rs 5,26,299, across 353 ads, has been spent on Facebook pages named after Rahul Gandhi. But not a single page is paid for by Rahul or the Congress. In the same period, a page called ‘My First Vote for Modi’ was the fourth biggest ad spender on Facebook—a whopping Rs 1.39 crore. O’Brien has demanded that surrogate campaigns run for the BJP be investigated. He claims Facebook favoured the BJP on the promise that the Modi government would allow its Free Basics and WhatsApp payments services in India.

While the BJP has been the frontrunner in exploiting social media, its patronage of Facebook is not quite explicit yet. In 2016, Facebook’s proposal to launch Free Basics—to provide a free, Facebookcentric internet service—was rejected by the government, albeit after some hue and cry from net neutrality activists. The WhatsApp payments service launch has also been pending for over two years.

Besides, linkages between social media platforms and political parties are unlikely to be guided by ad revenue as political ads do not draw big money. In 2019, political ads accounted for just 0.5 per cent of the revenue for social media platforms. Between February 2019 and September 5 this year, political ads generated Rs 62 crore for Facebook— a meagre amount for a global giant. In the 2019 general election, Twitter earned just over Rs 10 lakh from the BJP and the Congress. The real binding force is the pull factor of the narrative spun by political parties—the traffic it brings to the platform. Rahul Jain, managing director of InnoServ Group, which owns digital marketing agency Social Rajneeti, says: “The claims of political bias among social media platforms are highly exaggerated. Irrespective of my clients’ political affiliations, I have faced difficulty in getting our campaigns approved, but not because of any bias.”

Social media platforms claim they have tried to curb hatemongering and fake news by upgrading their community standards. Facebook claims 95 per cent of the content it removed in 2020 was autodetected by the platform, up from

Greater transparency in spending by political parties on social media will allow users to differentiate between genuine content and propaganda” —SHASHITHAROOR Chairman, Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT It is important to be diligent and sensible while formulating regulatory laws on digital media” —RAMMADHAV National General Secretary, BJP

What’s the point of demanding identity proof from a common citizen when people in power are misusing social media with impunity?” —DEREKO’BRIEN Parliament Party Leader in Rajya Sabha, Trinamool Congress The BJP understood quite early how to bypass the traditional modes of communication and set a narrative using social media” —PRIYANKACHATURVEDI Shiv Sena Deputy Leader in Rajya Sabha

24 per cent in 2017. The latest Twitter Transparency report claims a 47 per cent jump in the number of accounts that have been acted against, as compared to the last reporting period. “Over time, the learning algorithms get better and we should have social media that has been able to selfpolice and remove hate campaigns and fake narratives. However, we do not see that happening with the large monopolistic social media giants,” says Jaijit Bhattacharya, president, Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research, New Delhi.

To avoid political bias, Twitter has decided to ban political ads altogether. “Elevating political debate and open discourse is fundamental to our core values. We banned political ads in 2019 as we believe that the reach of political messages should be earned, not bought,” a Twitter spokesperson told india today. But experts argue that political parties can still create “user generated content” through influencers and digital marketing agencies.

Most experts agree that attaching an identity proof to social media accounts will help reduce mischief. But there could be inherent dangers. “In some parts of the world, people’s lives would be at risk if they were not able to post anonymously—human rights defenders, dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists, artists. We focus on behaviours, and not just content, which means that regardless of whether or not you use your real name, you cannot circumvent our enforcement,” said the Twitter spokesperson. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who is the chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on information technology, suggests a middle path. “People could use a pseudonym publicly, but the social medium knows who they are, so that any abuse can be pinned to an individual whose identity has been verified. This will also eliminate bots,” he says.

FIXING ACCOUNTABILITY

When faced with accountability issues, social media platforms argue that they are tech companies and not content creators. In India, social media and other Internet platforms (termed as ‘intermediaries’) are exempted from liabilities, thanks to Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The authorities can act against users misusing a platform but not the platform itself. “The government must frame regulations to hold these platforms accountable. There should be a mechanism for reporting malicious content and immediate action,” says Rohan Gupta, social media head of the Congress. Prasad has asked Facebook to put in place countryspecific ‘community guidelines’ that show respect for India’s social, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity.

Following a spate of lynching incidents in 2018, the ministry of electronics and IT had proposed amendments to the rules for information and messaging platforms. Among other things, it asked ‘intermediaries’ to give access to the origin of a message within 72 hours of any government agency requesting so. WhatsApp declined, citing invasion of privacy. Its encryption system makes conversations impenetrable to the company itself. Though this has made the platform vulnerable to misuse, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has advised against bringing communication platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple FaceTime, Google Chat, Skype and Telegram under any regulatory regime. TRAI feels making interception mandatory would weaken the protective architecture of the communication apps or expose them to “unlawful actors”.

Experts strike a note of caution on the IT Intermediaries Guidelines (Amendment) Rules, 2018. “The proposed amendments to the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules create more problems than they solve as they will only enable governmentinfluenced censorship without any check on power grab by the platform oligopolies,” says Mishi Choudhary, legal director, Software Freedom Law Center, New York.

More than legislation, the need is for a comprehensive social media policy. “Regulation can help, but in a country where legal remedies take time, social media giants must realise that the onus is on them to track down such instances and crack down in real time,” says Tharoor. Pratik Sinha of Alt News, a factchecking portal, expects no positive change till the time social media giants change their business models. “In the current business model, the algorithms on these platforms will always favour sensationalist content,” says Sinha. Perhaps, as Manzar hopes, there will eventually be a course correction with a saturation point wherein people stop getting influenced by social media altogether.

—with Roshni Majumdar