 Hello and let's talk about Facebook and its relationship with the BJP. A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published a report which said that the social media giant had not taken action against BJP legislator Iraja Singh despite his post-falling foul of the company's standards regarding his speech. According to Facebook insiders, Akhidas, the head of policy for the region, had a say in this decision which was taken to make sure that business would not be affected. The report also listed other instances of BJP leaders' content being untouched and other pro-BJP decisions by the company. This raises a lot of questions about Facebook's relationship with the ruling party and its long-term implications for our democracy. We talked to senior journalist Paranjay Gohatapurtha on some of these issues. So Paranjay, the standard argument given by Facebook on when any of these questions is raised in any country of the world is that we agree that there a lot has to be done and we agree that much more, you know, but like you said, these are algorithms. We're trying the extent of the problem is too great. We're trying to, you know, solve it. If things are brought to our notice, we try to take it down. So this is the standard responses which gives the impression of a company which is desperately trying but failing to control the problem of hate. So does the experience in India bear out this argument or justify this argument? Yeah, you see, faced with pressure from different parts of the world, from Australia, from New Zealand, from Germany, from France, from other parts of the world, Facebook had to set up what they called an external oversight committee comprising a big team of eminent public figures who are supposed to have the power to even overrule what Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the two, the top two individuals in Facebook, what they, even their decisions. Now so far we haven't seen the committee having, as far as India is concerned, we haven't seen any intervention from that committee. Now this argument, yeah, this is our technology. Let's take an example from India. Some years ago in Rajasthan's Raj Samand district, a person killed another person who was a Muslim neighbor and the so-called love jihad, he was allegedly trying to entice a Hindu woman. But the story is that this killing, this gruesome act was videographed by a relative of this man. But Facebook threw its hands up and said, we can't do anything about it. Our end-to-end encryption technology, we don't know who's put it up. We don't know who it's gone to. Now this is really a deep problem. You are refusing to be accountable. Even the present government, even Mr. Narendra Modi's government, Ravi Shankar Prasad more than once said, look, what if there are heinous crimes, whether there's a murder or a rape and there's evidence on WhatsApp. Now the courts of India are actually using evidence that's come on WhatsApp. But that means you actually have to seize a person's phone and then get access to all the WhatsApp messages. WhatsApp itself is not going to oblige you. The last point is, you know, this whole thing about, we'll take care of our hate speech. We have machines as machine learning. There's algorithms. I mean, a lot of it is just a lot of war. I mean, these algorithms are designed by human beings. So I'm saying to expect those machines, to expect those algorithms to take care of hate speech is, in my opinion, completely unrealistic. Now, what we are seeing is the giant Bahama. This is one of the largest corporate conglomerates on the planet. And it, despite all the criticism, it is desperately struggling to invoke provisions of free speech, privacy to keep going. I mean, recently, you will be aware that a number of giant corporations, including Coca-Cola and Ford, actually withdrew advertising from Facebook. I mean, they tried to hit where it would hurt. But Facebook seems to be trying to brazen it out. What we are clearly seeing is that the views of people like Misaki Das and Shivnath Thakral prevails even when, within the same organization, there is opposition or there are complaints that the kind of content that has been put out is against the company's rules. Yeah, it is not inappropriate. I mean, look in India Prashant, there have been dozens of mob lynchings. There have been Hindu-Muslim riots. There have been public lack of order, public disorder, if you like. And behind all of these incidents and episodes, you have WhatsApp messages. Absolutely. In this context, one aspect, the article points out, of course, but also something you have been working on quite extensively is the fact that Facebook has giant commercial plans in India. Now, there is, of course, the investment in reliance that we've seen. There's a WhatsApp payment option that has been pending for quite some time. So could you take us a bit through what, so far, we've uncovered of what Facebook's grand plans for India also are? As in, why is this an important market? That's correct. For some years now, Facebook had been lobbying to get its payments mechanisms going, because that's the one way WhatsApp can make money. Now, the Reserve Bank of India took its time, but the argument was really about data localization, because after Google Play came into the act, they have the WhatsApp payment mechanism has come through. But the point is, here you have a giant international monopoly, a conglomerate, which is tying up with an Indian conglomerate headed by India's richest man, Mr. Mukesh Ambani, who's also Asia's richest man, and among the world's most wealthy individuals. And you have a domestic big week in the form of Reliance Geo, which was nowhere in the picture four years ago. And today has the highest number of subscribers. It's the biggest telecommunications and mobile internet data services provider. And now, at a time when the economy is in a mess, there's been a complete collapse in economic activity. There's been widespread hunger, deprivation, and all kinds of terrible things that have been happening. Here you see Facebook investing billions of dollars in Reliance Geo. So we have a classic case of an international monopoly and a domestic monopoly coming together. And what its impact would be in India, on Indian politics, on free speech, on the way different kinds of content is distributed and disseminated. What, at the end of the day, you get to read, and you get to hear, and you get to watch. All of this would have, in my opinion, a profound impact, just as the Watsri Journal has flagged the impact on politics when you have the top brass of Facebook in India in very close proximity to the ruling dispensation, what we might end up seeing are bigger challenges and bigger issues. And in this context, finally, so what we do have is, of course, like you exactly pointed out, that the company itself having a decisive impact on Indian politics. And this happens, of course, both the actions of individuals who make these decisions, but also in terms of how the product itself has seeped so much into our lives, whether it be Facebook, whether it be Instagram, whether it be WhatsApp. And so then the question of what is a democracy? What is your politics? All this is inextricably connected with these products. So in this context, based on global examples, what do you see as any kind of way forward, at least in an ideal situation, whether this government is interested in implementing it is a different question, but what are the possibilities that lie ahead? Okay, now, before I answer your question, let me give you one very prominent, egregious example of how WhatsApp has been used in India. And let me give you the example from the 22nd of December, 2018, when Amit Shah, who was then the president of the Bharti Janta Party, who's today India's home minister, he was speaking at a public rally for social media volunteers of the BJP at Kota in Rajasthan. Now, he remarked, we are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet or sour, true or fake. Now, he is the second most powerful person in the country at present. He's the home minister of the country. This issue has been raised in Rajasthan by parliament. Now, let's contextualize what he said. Before the Uttar Pradesh elections took place in February, March, 2017, this was India's most popular state, the BJP had set up huge groups of WhatsApp supporters and the total was about 3.2 million, 32 lakhs. And the really ironical part about the whole thing is that it was supposed to tell BJP volunteers about the truth and about false information. Now, one particular person had put out a bit of fake information that the then chief minister Akhilesh Yadav had slapped his father, Mulan Singh Yadav. It was completely fake, but the whole WhatsApp message went viral and this is what Mr. Amit Shah had to say. So, you know, he said an environment of Mohal had been created. As members of the audience smirked and unsure, Mr. Amit Shah's tongue was firmly in his cheek when he almost lovingly chided them and said, this is something worth doing, but don't do it. You understand what I'm saying? So this is the sheer part of how WhatsApp has been used and misused for political purposes. Ravish Kumar, VNDTV India anchor has famously remarked that there's a huge number of people in India who haven't had the privilege of getting quality education in an education institution. They are growing up in WhatsApp University. Let me give you a personal example. A young relative of mine came one day and he said, you know, not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim. And I said, who told you this? He said, what's that? So this is the way it spreads. Coming to your point about, can you control? How do you control? In the US they've been struggling. Elizabeth Warren, a legislator of the Democratic Party, she actually argued that you should break Facebook up and Google up, actually fragment these by law, break up these monopolies in the way AT&T, American telephone and telegraph. The company set up by Alexander Graham Bell had been broken up. The way Standard Oil, SO had been broken up. Whether that will happen, I'm not at all sure. It certainly won't happen under a Trump administration, but we'll have to wait and watch. Within India too, the regulatory mechanisms are inadequate. And there is always this counter-argument, free speech, freedom of expression, technical, you know, this whole, that what can be... Fecressive algorithms. Yes, yes, yes. You take shelter behind your ideas of privacy and free speech to just be able to earn more and more money. At the end of the day, a lot of people don't realize, oh, Facebook, we're able to connect with our good friend, we're able to share our pictures, we're able to meet long-lost, whatever, schoolmates. But you don't realize the other side of the coin. That you, your behavior is being closely tracked. You are being followed and your behavior is being sold for Facebook to earn profits. After all, it's a private company. It wants to maximize its profits. But the dangers it poses to society, to political, to what's happening in the country, to politics in this country, are really very, very important. And then this is true for many other countries in the world. And after the World Street Journal article, certainly true for India. Thank you so much, Parazar, for talking to us. My pleasure. In our next segment, we look at a common concern many of us have regarding COVID-19, that of reinfections. There's been a lot of speculation and debate over whether those who have already contracted the disease once may do so again. How likely is this to happen? We bring you a segment of a conversation between news clicks Praveer Purkayashta and immunologist Dr. Satyidrath. Coming to the question of reinfection, there are also some examples you've been talked about where reinfections is said to have occurred. Now, in the very large number of cases which are there in the world today, and we have the total number is really very large, number of reinfections of this kind reported that really you can count on the fingers of our hands. So effectively it seems a rare occurrence, but could you explain that the chances of reinfection or at least within five, six months is why it is so rare and this is likely to be only an outlier? So this is going to be a very unsatisfactory answer because it's essentially going to say that in none of the cases of reinfection that have been anecdotally described, do we actually know that it's reinfection? And here's why we don't know. How do we know that there's infection because you test the fluid and you find virus viral RNA? Let's not even worry about whether that's whole infectious virus or not, you find viral RNA. You test 15 days later, you find, then you test 15 days later, you don't find. Then a month later, you test, you find. Now, is this reinfection or is it just that one of these tests was just technically not right and missed finding the viral RNA? Most of the reinfection stories we hear fall in this category. And therefore, in most of them, it's at the moment impossible to distinguish between the possibility that it's a reinfection and the possibility that these people are that very small and interesting and important minority who clear virus very, very, very, very, very, very slow. The cases have been up to nine months that the virus stays in the body. That's absolutely right. So therefore, it's more likely to be that kind of an outlier than a reinfection outlier. It's certainly as likely to be that as this. So both hypotheses stay and it's difficult to say which is which. And since we've been saying that this is much about the substance of science as about the politics of science and society, let me take a moment to explain how we would differentiate between the possibility that this is simply a continuing infection versus that it's a reinfection. So if you had the entire viral RNA sequenced, then between two samples, if there was sequence continuity, it's the same virus. But if the second sample is clearly different in sequence from the first sample because you were quieted from somebody else in whom the virus has changed in the meanwhile differently, then you have true reinfection. So the way to ask the question to people who talk about reinfection is, are there viral sequencing data from before the negative test and after the negative test? Much more difficult to. Much more difficult. Coming to the other issue, which of course is hanging in the background of all this is the efficacy of the vaccine. That how long will it be assuming the vaccine is successful and we have enough number of cases for us at least to sound optimistic at this stage. Assuming one or two or more of the vaccines will become effective. The question remains for how long? Now, does it mean that after three months they won't be effective? That after six months they won't be effective? Or what is a likelihood using your crystal ball as a immune system expert? What would be the crystal ball that you would consult and what would it say? So Praveer, I am enjoying myself today because this is my second one of sounding optimistic. And after a very long time of not sounding optimistic. The point of our viewers that this is not an usual occurrence that we get him optimistic twice in a show. I mean, one itself is a big thing. But it's funny for the interruption. So here's the issue. When you have a virus infection, we have an immune response, absolutely. But the virus has gotten selected in a sort of mutual evolution where the virus that is infecting us successfully has figured out at least a little bit of how to deal with immunity. Simply because a virus strain that cannot deal well with immunity will get propagated poorly. So a viral variant that deals somehow with immunity will be preferentially propagated in proper Darwinian evolution. That's the strain that will come to dominate. Now, if that's the case, then the likelihood is that SARS-CoV-2 has ways of fiddling with the immune response. But SARS-CoV-2 is not what we are putting into the vaccine. Remember, we've been discussing a variety of vaccine design technologies in all of which we take one protein of SARS-CoV-2 and simply get the body to see the protein and to make an immune response against it. We don't put a live SARS-CoV-2 virus into the body as a vaccine. So none of the tricks that SARS-CoV-2 is using to fiddle with the immune response are included in the vaccine. So the fact that SARS-CoV-2 infection may lead to short-lived immunity is not telling us that the vaccines that we are designing will also necessarily lead to short-lived immunity. Now, the vaccine technologies may have their own limitations because of which some anti-vaccine responses will last less long than other anti-vaccine responses. But the fact that SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses may not be long-lived is no pessimistic guarantee that vaccine responses are going to be short-lived. For all we know, vaccine responses will be respectively lived. That optimistic point made, let me add a pessimistic footnote, which is that my expectation is that the first-generation vaccines which will come up as we've been discussing by the end of this year, my guess is that they will not be great vaccines. They will work, they will be useful, but they will not provide 100% protection, but they'll provide some protection. They'll not be very long-lived, but they'll be reasonably long-lived. But that's not going to be because SARS-CoV-2 is short-lived immunity. That's all we have. Time for today. We'll be back tomorrow with more news developments from the country. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.