Facebook just did a Thanos-esque move on April 1st, snapped its fingers, and deleted a bunch of pages and accounts that were either engaging in ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’ or ‘civic spam’. These removals were specifically targeted to India and Pakistan.
There are several problems with this action that the digital Thanos, Facebook, took. It went from being an intermediary which is supposed to provide a platform for people to make connections — while being fed ads through a complex algorithm, of course — to straight up information gatekeeping. Simply put: Elections are coming and Facebook playing an overarching role in what people see, what they don’t see, is equivalent to meddling with the elections of another country.
But before we get to that, let’s talk a bit about the fallout of their action.
Inauthentic Behavior + Civic Spam = Pissed of BJP folks
Facebook went ahead and named two specific entities from India which were engaged in ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’: Indian National Congress cell and BJP linked IT firm Silver Touch. Mind you, they did not directly name BJP in their statement but named INC. It gave out the impression that INC is the one indulging in this complex online and harmful behavior, while BJP is itself quite clean.
Facebook said the inauthentic behavior removal is happening for the following reason: “We’re taking down these Pages and accounts based on their behaviour, not the content they posted. In each case detailed below, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves.”
Cool. So, essentially they are identifying behavioural patterns — them meaning a trained algorithm — and then taking a call on whether it is suspicious and breaking their platform rules or not. When they named INC IT cell for this, some usual suspects immediately jumped on it, obviously.
#CongFakeCampaign | Embarrassed Congress issues clarification after Facebook’s ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ crackdownhttps://t.co/2wMkevwA1E
— Republic (@republic) April 1, 2019
Poll season’s biggest controversy, Facebook scraps 687 Congress linked accounts, Congress relies on fake news for votes?
Tweet With #FakeNewsScandal and Call Us On: 0120-6634691/692/693/694 and share your views with us. pic.twitter.com/f9E4tbgTxw
— TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) April 1, 2019
Even our IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was quick to react. And, predicatably enough, he linked it to Pakistan.
A historic thing has happened. On the same day, Pakistan’s ISI accounts have also been blocked which was also fake news. This shows what is happening on both sides of the border & how fake news is used to discredit PM Modi: @rsprasad on Facebook removing pages ‘linked to the INC’ pic.twitter.com/9unnEDtZUi
— moneycontrol (@moneycontrolcom) April 1, 2019
Anyway, obvious rhetoric aside, they did make a big mistake though. Either they got their information wrong or they reacted before really seeing what Facebook had actually done. Because what followed was a horde of pissed-off BJP folks complaining that their accounts and pages have been taken down too.
Pratik Sinha of Alt News did a Twitter thread on specifically the BJP right-leaning pages that were taken down.
Many RW accounts are furious that their FB pages or pages of people they know have been unpublished/deleted. Yet Facebook press release talks about exactly 1 RW page – The India Eye. Why so? pic.twitter.com/ITvX9CFF68
— Pratik Sinha (@free_thinker) April 1, 2019
According to The Print, around 200 pro-BJP pages were taken down. The report says the total reach of pro-BJP pages has been reduced by 20 crore users.
You see, apart from the obvious name and shame part of their statement which featured INC & Silver Touch, Facebook also removed spam pages. According to the statement, they took the following action: “We removed 321 Facebook Pages and accounts in India that have broken our rules against spam. Unlike the first three actions, this last activity does not represent a single or coordinated operation — instead, these are multiple sets of Pages and accounts that behaved similarly and violated our policies.”
They further go on to elaborate what was the supposed criteria of the removal: “This included using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names; impersonating someone else; posting links to malware; and posting massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages in order to drive traffic to websites they are affiliated with in order to make money.” [Emphasis added.]
One might argue that this is a good move. There have been demands for cleaning Social Media of fake news and misinformation for a long time now. Facebook’s action seems to be in that direction. But it comes with a whole new set of problems.
Thin line between spam, propaganda and authentic content
India is currently Facebook’s largest market with close to 30 crore active users. That’s a large chunk of our population who is about to vote in the next general elections. Today, Facebook might have taken down pro-BJP pages, pro-INC pages, tomorrow it might be some other party. Next year, it might be content that Facebook considers problematic. Modern-day political parties are creating propaganda content like an assembly line on a daily basis. That’s a fact. Some of this content is blatantly misleading and pure propaganda meant to influence voters. But that’s essentially what political parties do. They hire digital mercenaries to come up with ways to spread their message in whatever way possible. This is war and whoever controls the narrative, controls the voter and thus controls the government.
This propaganda needs to be called out by citizens. Fact-checked by journalists and countered in a legitimate methodical fashion. That’s the job of the fourth estate and the citizenry. Facebook, on the other hand, is a platform which is supposed to just be that: A platform. They should take note of reports from users and have a team ready to counter misinformation on a case-by-case basis. It’s a huge task but that is the way to handle it.
By going all Thanos on India’s Right before the elections, it is giving out the signal that they are the big daddy of information control now, not political parties or the citizens consuming the content. Pages like Postcard News and India Eye are known for generating fake news. But those are just two pages. There are 300+ more which we don’t really know about. Were there legitimate pages which were also removed because they posted certain kind of content? What was the deciding criteria for Facebook, apart from the ‘violation of policy guidelines’ spiel?
Simply put, Monday’s action by the platform singles out two countries and certain narratives. Facebook is a multinational US-based company, a private entity, which is taking a call on what narratives are OK and which aren’t. India doesn’t have set intermediary liability rules yet which would define what is the role of social media platforms when it comes to curating content. By naming INC, it has already done some damage by handing over a new narrative for the governing party on a golden platter. This, according to me, counts as manipulation of elections.
The Internet is playing a huge role in the elections this time. While parties are happily using it to spread misinformation — because that’s what they do — citizens are also happily using it to expose overtures of the government and other parties. Today Facebook is taking action on the former, tomorrow it could be the latter. Facebook’s Thanos snap has set a dangerous precedent and we don’t really know what would come after this.
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