Folks on social media sharing bad news about democracy
Social media aids the velocity, virality and volume of divisive and dangerous speech. When online interactions routinise abusive speech, hate becomes a matter of habit.
During the 48-hour silence period before the first phase of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in India, when no political party can advertise or campaign, I received quite a few political Whats App forwards. One was purportedly a text of a BBC survey predicting the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory, stating this to be good for Indian democracy. Another combined two images — the first showed Congress leader Sachin Pilot climbing a ladder next to the billboard of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the second showed him defiling Modi’s face with black ink, with the accompanying text underscoring the spitefulness of Congress leaders. The third was a video, which showed ‘BJP goons’ thrashing a Muslim man. The first was a rehashed version of junk news that had been widely circulated before the Karnataka state elections in 2018. The second showed Modi’s face clearly while Pilot’s was hazy. The blackening of Modi’s face was clearly done by an ink tool available in any of the free image-editing software. The third was debunked by the fact-checking site Alt News as gang-related violence. All these forwards were sent by highly educated urban professionals. To test whether the human chain works as effectively in countering misinformation, I replied to all three senders, stating these messages to be false, backing my claim with verifiable evidence and asking them to do the same with those from whom they had received the forwards, hoping they would, in a sense, pay it backward and dispel the rumours. They didn’t. Few would like to be proven wrong and fewer would like to acknowledge that publicly. Disinformation (information spread by those who are aware of it being false) thrives because of misinformation (information spread by those who are not aware of it being false). Along with propaganda,
disinformation deep-strikes into the heart of a democracy, distorting perspectives through flawed narratives. These time-tested weapons of information warfare have become deadlier due to the affordances of social media that have led to the lumpenisation of the literates.
This is the under-researched aspect of state-orchestrated disinformation campaigns — the role of citizens as the active carriers of dangerous online content that polarise the populace and trigger offline violence. Countries like India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Turkey and Germany have suffered an increase in hate crimes fuelled by social media-driven disinformation campaigns. In 2018, the Oxford Internet Institute came out with a report on computational propaganda (the use of automation, algorithms and big-data analytics to manipulate public life) which found India to be among the major countries where social media was used for mass opinion manipulation by at least one political party/agency. Most political parties engage in some form of computational propaganda. Those with more money and manpower can control the content and flow of information. While stories of political parties bankrolling the sunrise sector of disinformation abound and the government mulls over regulating platforms, the root of the problem lies in the number of willing receivers and disseminators of disinformation present in a divided society.
Disinformation campaigns are often built around ‘an element of truth’, according to the European East StratCom Task Force, which was established to fight Russia’s disinformation campaigns.
In India, following the Pulwama attack, disinformation spread around one story was massive, according to Trushar Barot, who leads Facebook’s integrity initiatives in India. While the partisan peddlers of disinformation have set shop on Facebook, targeting 36 per cent of the voting-age population, most of whom are from urban areas, WhatsApp, Helo, ShareChat and TikTok are preferred for semi-urban and rural audiences.
Disinformation campaigns are less about moulding mindsets and more about pandering to subterranean biases of the society so that these come out in the open, making unacceptable speech and action acceptable. Social media aids the velocity, virality and volume of divisive and dangerous speech. When online interactions routinise abusive speech, hate becomes a matter of habit. The oft-cited example of people not shouting from the town square the filth they spew online because of the anonymity afforded by social media becomes redundant.
People who are already heavily polarised flock to certain websites regardless of their notoriety for spreading false news.
A 2017 study by William H Dutton proved that the fears of online echo chambers and filter bubbles abetting junk news are overstated. People will believe what they want to believe. Citizens were found to be active curators of digital disinformation as per a 2018 study by Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Mareike Hartmann and Rebecca Adler-Nissen, on Russian news outlets RIA Novosti, Sputnik and RT. Further, a 2018 study of Twitter posts by Sinan Aral, Deb Roy and Soroush Vosoughi showed falsehoods were 70 per cent more likely to be tweeted than facts. They found humans and not bots to be primary purveyors of false news. While political astroturfing might be done by seeding false news on social media through commercial botnets (groups of bots), sock-puppet networks and paid human trolls, these are fertilised by people willing to spread such messages.
India is in the midst of the world’s largest social media-driven election. Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, published a case study on April 8 of proBJP and pro-Congress bots deployed on a large scale on February 9 and 10 to manipulate Twitter traffic. But the impact of this offensive was less due to the relatively low number of followers for each account. But WhatsApp, despite its many efforts to curb false and hateful content, can be used to reach out to 256 million voters if one calculates one WhatsApp group of 256 members each for the one million polling booths. There are reportedly 87,000 groups on WhatsApp dedicated to spreading information to sway voters, which can potentially reach 22 million voters. The recipients of false information can quickly spread it across multiple networks. The legal problem of not just curbing content creators but controlling disseminators of disinformation without violating freespeech norms crops up.
The silencing of political opponents, journalists and individual critics is not done only by governments, as shown by several digital media labs in India, the US and Europe that have been conducting research on malicious bots and trolls. This is a concerted warfare by the online army of data capitalists—that is, those who have the money to maintain monopoly over who gets to speak and who doesn’t. When political parties become data capitalists, especially populist parties, which thrive on the ‘us’-versus-‘them’ rhetoric, majoritarian narratives become dominant narratives. The voices tend to be the loudest and brashest on either side of the political spectrum. In her book The Politics of Fear, Professor Ruth Wodak did a discourse analysis of the speeches of right-wing populist parties in Europe and found that they thrived on the ‘politics of fear’ and the ‘arrogance of ignorance’— where straighttalking became a euphemism for no-holdsbarred rhetoric and intellectuals, defined as those who held liberal views, were derided as woolly- headed tree-huggers.
Unless we are aware of what scholars Hossein Derakshan and Claire Wardle call the ‘information disorder’, we won’t be able to meaningfully deal with the problems of disinformation, misinformation and propaganda. This involves dealing with three types of bad information: disinformation, misinformation and mal-information (information intended to do harm) at the phases of their creation (by targeting the agent), production (by targeting the message) and distribution (by targeting the interpreter).
While political parties might or might not follow the 48-hour silent period on social media, stopping their supporters from acting as their proxies in spreading false news is extremely difficult. Lastminute aggressive disinformation campaigns can reel in undecided voters. —Open magazine
Disinformation deep-strikes into the heart of a democracy, distorting perspectives through flawed narratives. These timetested weapons of information warfare have become deadlier.