The Future of India Foundation on Thursday released a report, “Politics of Disinformation”, which recommended a comprehensive transparency law and a regulator under parliamentary oversight for social media platforms.
Ruchi Gupta, co-founder and director of the Foundation, said disinformation was a political problem and that any way forward should be located within the bipartisan democratic political process.
As long as amplification of content was driven by engagement instead of the quality of content or trustworthiness of content sources, the current content-moderation driven approach to disinformation by all major social media platforms would not stop the spread of misinformation. The platforms should either stop amplification and revert to chronological feed or take ownership of their distribution choices, said the Foundation.
Primary ground
While suggesting a transparency law and a regulator under parliamentary oversight for social media platforms, the report said public opinion was the currency of democracy and social media platforms were increasingly becoming the primary ground for public discourse and mobilisation of public opinion.
“Giving control over the public discourse to a handful of individuals heading technology companies lacks both transparency and democratic legitimacy... platforms have shown themselves unable to work together to evolve a coherent framework to stop misinformation and have instead responded erratically to events and ad hoc public pressure,” it said.
The report’s suggestions included making amplification contingent on credibility of creators and sources, labelling content producers instead of individual posts, review “super” users, removing design choices which incentivise extreme content, developing ecosystem approach to fact-checking and scale digital literacy programmes.
