Anjana Kesav
The internet revolution’s most evident form of expression in the political arena has undoubtedly been through social media politicking. A considerable section of the hitherto silent section of the populace has found utterance through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and such. Ideally, this should produce some impactful change in the current gender/caste blind status of policy making. Whether any such improvement has taken place as a consequence of the rise of their voices on social media is doubtful.
Facebook has quite successfully created a space with no apparent restrictions, where to this day, desperate youth throng in large numbers hoping to draw attention to their daily struggles. The false sense of freedom it creates has, however, had quite the opposite effect. The nexus between the social media giant and the political regime has meant that now dissenters can be easily monitored and exterminated as and when the situation demands it. Facebook has brought all the dissenters in one place and weakened them further with technology, enabling real-time surveillance and constant supervision.
Facebook and Human Rights
The last few years of Facebook supremacy has ironically coincided with some of the grossest human rights violations in the country; much of these incidents were state-sanctioned. The validation of these incidents by certain non-stake holding sections of the general populace was made possible through social media smear campaigns and hate speeches, which Facebook’s hate speech policy failed to acknowledge or curtail. Therefore, Facebook appears no different from many other corporate-sponsored media outlets and needs to be seen exactly this way.
Facebook’s is a politically conditioned ecosystem and not a neutral platform as it poses itself to be. The media freedom that is frequently associated with most of these sites is in reality, part of the bigger project engineered to help provide a fillip to their political accomplices’ post-truth politics.
Social Media: An Alternative News Source?
A good proportion of the social media populace is guided by the erroneous belief that these sites are somehow an alternative to conventional news sources. Even though some trustworthy crowd-sourced news outlets have helped to slightly transform the news landscape, it would be imprudent not to consider the disproportionate size of false information campaigns that have been sustained by the same sites. Of late, most of our information about global and local events have come from social media sites and hence, needs to be read with the strictest scrutiny.
Journalistic integrity is clearly not one of capitalism’s buzzwords. Any piece of information that does not help market their product or in extension, their ideology is worth nothing under this economic system.
In fact, as far as Facebook inc. is concerned, the more virulent a piece of information that gets shared through the medium, the better. One of the reasons why such social media sites have done nothing to regulate their content despite widespread backlash is because it hurts their rather profitable business model to do so. The company has been a complacent onlooker of the degradation of our economy and polity. This must come as a wake-up call to all those who think free-market capitalism promotes individual liberty.
Business, Algorithm, Advertisement
Until recently, much of this was attributed to the existence of online troll armies within the payroll of the ruling dispensation, which the social media site found difficult to curb. With the recent Facebook exposé, however, it has come to light that the corporates that run these multi-billion media platforms are themselves facilitators of bigotry, because of their peculiar business models. This means, in addition to their domineering presence on social media, the company itself has been complicit in pushing forth the dominant narrative. These extensive establishments thriving and flourishing on a profit motive have hardly any social responsibility that goes beyond their yearly CSR, it has time and again been ascertained.
It’s much-acclaimed business model is based on advertising and uses algorithms that ensure the continuous, dedicated and consistent online presence of its users. The idea is to keep the users glued to the news feed long enough to make them prospective buyers of the products that are advertised on it. Whether the content on the newsfeed goes on to malign an entire community, jeopardize social stability, or start a civil war, hardly matters to those at Facebook inc.
This, as a matter of fact, must not come as too much of a surprise either. Has it ever been possible to rein in any of our big corporates? Facebook’s media strategy is also one that has largely been successful in hoodwinking its massive user base. The algorithm makes sure that information that cements into public perception and the dominant political narrative is served the public.
Populism, Authoritarianism
“If you are not paying for it, you are the product”, the oft-quoted marketing mantra is extremely relevant in the world of social media websites. These sites use a concept termed ARPU, that stands for Average Revenue Per User, which, in the context of this piece, must be self-explanatory. To put it plainly, these sites stand to gain little from standing with popular uprisings or give a damn about its users’ rights or their violation. What matters to them is merely the amount of time an average user spends on social media at a given geographical location — this is what is monetised. In fact, it turns out that Facebook has played a major role in turning fascists into populist leaders. The populism these leaders currently seem to be basking in presently has been achieved through Facebook’s proctored manoeuvres. A transition made possible through years of work, the two general elections in the intervening years also owe a great deal to their dedicated PR work. Like any other multinational corporations, the profitability of its businesses is Facebook.inc’s primary, if not sole, concern. Pushing a country to authoritarian rule are small prices to be paid for maximizing its profits at its largest Asian market.
In addition to the toxic nature of the business model, it has come to light that Facebook has been trying to make inroads into organs of the government, and the ruling establishment on its part has had no qualms in throwing open the doors of law-making bodies to foreign companies. The political party in question is not one that is known to throw caution to the wind like that, meaning the relationship between the two has been more or less symbiotic. The large gaps in terms of privacy protection in the Data Protection Bill, tabled last year, legally facilitates state surveillance — if the idea is to sell our data to Facebook remains to be seen. Their claims of data encryption and user privacy protection have already fallen flat. Daily reports on WSJ’s Facebook exposé issue hint at the existence of a “Facebook deep state”.
The social media giant has already begun reaping the benefits of its cooperation with BJP. In April, the technological sector in India saw the largest ever FDI by a foreign company when Facebook announced its investments in Jio platforms. The idea is to eat into Jio’s and Facebook’s humongous user base. Reliance’s recent announcement, according to which all dues to TRAI have been cleared worth crores, virtually proved that it has already decimated it’s few remaining rivals, namely Airtel and Idea, establishing a monopoly in the telecom sector now. This seems like the perfect fairytale end to a tough-love story, and perhaps the beginning of a new one?
Years of effort by team Facebook in elevating a not-so-major contender in national politics to the country’s supreme leader has reached a conclusive stage. A stage where patterns are clearly visible, but where it doesn’t matter anymore; where neither are the ends justified nor are the means.
References
- IBEF Knowledge Centre, ‘India’s Largest Tech FDI: Decoding the Facebook-Reliance Deal’, IBEF, April 2020
- Kissinger, Daniel, ‘Facebook Inc. Corporate Social Responsibility & Stakeholder Analysis’, Panmore Institute, June 2018
- Johnston, Matthew, ‘How Facebook Makes Money’, Investopedia, Jan 2020
- Philipose, Pamela, ‘Backstory: How Facebook and BJP Ring-Fenced India’, The Wire, Aug 2020
- The Wire Staff, ”Assess Human Agency Behind Algorithms’: Ex Civil Servants Write to Mark Zuckerberg’, The Wire, Aug 2020
- Cuofano, Gennaro, ‘How Does Facebook Make Money? Facebook Business Model In A Nutshell’
Anjana Kesav is a Final Year Chemical Engineering student at the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, Kerala.
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