 Hello, and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we are joined by Cyril Sam and Paranjai Gohatakurtha, the authors of a new book, The Real Face of Facebook in India, which looks at the role played by the social media giant in the political and social landscape of the country. Thank you, Cyril and Paranjai. Cyril, to start with you, we have seen, especially over the last one year, how Facebook has basically, in some senses, lost all its legitimacy. So in the political sphere, in the social sphere. So in the Indian context, how do you see these events spanning out? Or what are the characteristics of Facebook? What is the real face, so to speak? Facebook is turning into an organization. It's a commercial organization, a business entity. That is in some ways affecting, in a lot of ways, actually affecting the politics in the country. And that is essentially what the story of this book is. How is Facebook affecting politics in this country? And Paranjai, you've covered the Indian political scenario for decades now. So what do you see, what trends in the Indian political scenario do you see that Facebook is actually worsened or accentuated, actually? The ruling party in the country, the right wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which is ruling the country at present. It's one of its spokespersons. In fact, the person who heads its information technology cell, he's gone on record saying that this is India's WhatsApp elections. To take a few steps back, India is a country with 1.35 billion people. And we have about 900 million people who are eligible to vote. If you just look at the statistics, one out of three voters today has access to WhatsApp. Facebook can talk about 2.2 billion plus users across the planet. But it's in India with the maximum number of users of Facebook exist. I mean, these numbers are contentious, but somewhere in the region of about 230 million, there are even more users of WhatsApp, at least somewhere in the region of 300 million. So the fact is that we've seen the use of the social media go up like in a way very few people could have imagined. So WhatsApp has been weaponized by the ruling dispensation to spread not just its propaganda, but misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, Islamophobia. And it's been well documented and recorded how it's been misused for really very, very deadly purposes. I mean, there have been at least a few dozen, about 30 odd instances of mob lynching that have taken place in India over the last few years, where somehow or the other, a Facebook message has been linked to what has happened. And almost in all these cases, we find that the victim is a member of the minority community. And the perpetrators or the alleged perpetrators of the crime are those belonging through the majority community and some of them openly or covertly or allegiance to the ruling dispensation. Right. And so to start our takeoff from this point, so we have Facebook also saying that it is making a lot of attempts to kind of prevent hate speech and misinformation and disinformation from spreading. And there have been a lot of steps. And even in this election season, they claim to have introduced some measures. In the Indian context, how do you see Facebook's performance as far as these issues are concerned? If you look at, so Facebook released its election integrity project sometime, second half of last year. Results of the Indian elections will be declared on the 23rd of May. It's around the same time the European Union goes for an election. So it was around, so announcements for what is happening in India and what is happening in Europe were made at nearly the same time. And when you go through those documents that Facebook's put out, you realize that it's treating elections in Europe in a very different way. Rules are very different, tighter rules compared to what is happening in India, the rules that they published for India. It's also because in Europe they are facing, they are going to probably face some kind of regulations. In India, there is nothing like that happening. And in fact, at some point when someone in Facebook was asked about these things, I think this was Katie Habarth, who's the head of the political communications division at Facebook. And what she said was that government of India needs to move in, and they need to regulate a lot of these things. They need to put laws in these things because Facebook is helpless. So in India, it's a free for all, unlike, say, in Europe, where things are very different. If I can add a few points to what Cyril has said, contrary to what Facebook claims, that it's a neutral agnostic platform, what we've sought to document in our book is that certain individuals who are very close to, who work with Facebook and who earlier were indirectly associated with India's ruling party, how they've actually used these social media platforms to promote Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, as a larger than life, as a messiah. So the point that is worth emphasizing is that whereas Facebook's activities and how it's helped ruling dispensations and authoritarian regimes, how it's been complicit in the killings of innocent people, I mean, some of that has been recorded in Myanmar vis-a-vis the Rohingya refugees. We've had documentation of what Facebook has done in Argentina and other parts of the world. But we believe that it was important to document what has happened here in India. A lot of the information was scattered across websites, publications, and so we've sought to, at one level, collate it. At another level, Cyril and I spent about eight months speaking to about 60 people who were associated directly, indirectly, or who were aware of what was happening to put together how the propaganda machinery has been used and how Facebook has been perfectly aware of what's been going on and turned a blind eye to the most egregious kinds of violations of not just the right to free speech, but the abuse of its platform to spread fake information, false information, hateful speech, incendiary information. And I see that you also dedicated a chapter specifically to Cambridge Analytica as well. And its role in the Indian context is something that's not very well known to, because the news has largely been about the United States and Brexit for that matter. So could you also talk a bit about what its role in the Indian context has been? You know, Cambridge Analytica, if it could do what it did, we quote Prabir Purokaista, who's the head of NewsClick, saying, imagine what Facebook can do. In India, the role played by Cambridge Analytica and its associates. And we've sort of documented all the various organizations, the firms, the entities that were directly and directly associated, and their links. You know, I mean, they claim to have worked with all political parties, or both political parties. But there's a lot of debate, a lot of dispute what has happened. But when you look at what Cambridge Analytica could do, quote unquote, illegally, it's absolutely mind-boggling to think that rogue elements within the Facebook fraternity or those who are abusing those platforms what they can do. And I think more than Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, which is part of Google, it's really WhatsApp, which has become the weapon. And that's because you have end-to-end encryption. And there's been documented how instances of people who have been killed, they've been filmed on WhatsApp. But the authorities of both the Indian authorities, when they asked them, they said, we can't help you at all. We don't know who put it up. Our technology doesn't enable us to tell us who put it up and where it's going. So it's like you wash your hands of what has been happening, which is absolutely the worst kind of, I mean, it's not just criminal. It's absolutely using the social media platform to kill and murder. Right. And so recently, Mark Zuckerberg, a couple of days announced that Facebook's new mission is, the future is private in his words and talked about a new era of Facebook products, which are going to be more oriented towards privacy. So do you see these as having the potential to say address some of the issues you talked about in the book or is it a red herring, so to speak? I don't think it's going to affect anything. If anything, this is an attempt to preempt any kind of regulation. First, second is the reason why a lot of this has come out in public is because a lot of this information can be scraped, journalists can research, journalists and researchers can go through a lot of the information that is already public and make sense of what is happening. The moment you move private, we don't know what is happening anymore. And if you look at Facebook groups, which work like WhatsApp groups, especially closed and private groups, we have no idea what is happening in there and a lot of insightful, a lot of Islamophobic messages are floating there. And that is where they're headed, what they're trying. It's essentially a PR move to protect themselves from any kind of public scrutiny, any kind of journalism happening because what they've also done is they've now created a list of panel researchers who will have access to their data. So you and I can no longer have access to that data. So essentially they're just trying to cover their tracks. I think it's a knee-jerk reaction to the widespread condemnation of what happened in Christchurch in New Zealand on the 14th of March, where the killings of dozens of innocent people was broadcast live and that has attracted condemnation across the world. I think Facebook is under attack. I mean, there are politicians in the US and in Europe and in other countries of the world and also in India who are arguing that it's about time that this particular large digital monopoly was broken up and in the same ways which American Telephone and Telegraph, AT&T, the company or the conglomerate that had been founded by the person who invented the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, that had happened in the 80s in the US. The question that is now being raised and American lawmakers and European lawmakers are saying, yeah, it's about time these large digital monopolies shouldn't be allowed to get away and the only way that they can be controlled is by breaking them up. And foremost among the people who've suggested this is Elizabeth Warren, she's the Democratic party, aspirant, she intends to run for the post-representant of the US. And Tim Wu as well. Yes, a whole lot of other people. Absolutely correct, Tim Wu as well. Right, and to end on the larger question maybe in the sense that, like you pointed out, this is not just India, that is. For instance, in Brazil, where Bolsonaro's election, just a couple of days before, there was a whole widespread WhatsApp campaign. In the US we have, so do many of these, is it a structural issue with many of these social media firms that there is a possibility of so much right-wing hatred, misinformation, and propaganda being spread? And this is not just about Facebook, even Twitter for that matter, certain other firms. So do you see it as a larger structural issue in the way these firms were built, the internal culture, that organization that actually permits this? So I think the structural argument can be made for something like a Facebook, a YouTube, or a Twitter, which promotes the entire business model is around engagement, time spent. So these companies make more money when users spend more time on these platforms, and they engage more with the platform, making comments, sharing content, et cetera, et cetera. These kind of platforms prefer sensationalist content, because that's the only way people spend more time. So there's a structural issue with these companies there. When you move on to, say, private messaging apps like WhatsApp, or Telegram, or Signal, or any of those, there it's more about privacy laws. Privacy laws don't exist, which is why our phone numbers are floating around, which is why based on our phone numbers, people can, just based on our phone numbers, people can make huge profiles of us. I mean, connect our phone numbers to electricity bill, or our telephone bill, or our credit card scores, and they can build huge databases that they know, okay, this is how you target these people. Because at the end of the day, the business model of commercial internet is advertising. So Facebook is an advertising infrastructure. Twitter is an advertising infrastructure. YouTube is an advertising infrastructure. And when it's an advertising infrastructure, your primary motive is manipulation. So through all of this, what is happening is, users are constantly being manipulated. So to add to what he said, I mean, the structural issue is the greed to maximize your profits, when it conflicts against the absence of social responsibility and where you're politically always on the side of not just the right, but the whoever's in power and usually is in favor of authoritarian regimes, or suddenly those with all the money to spend. So because you lack nuance and you don't want nuance, you only want those extreme emotions. You want to see the world in terms of black and white. It is therefore often, it is the demagogues of the world are able to misuse it. Very, very effectively. And I think it's about time that the structural issues are dealt with at more than one level. At one level, yes, education, greater awareness, yes. I mean, I mean, look at India. There's such a large section of the population which is using WhatsApp, that has actually been deprived of quality education. So to use the television anchor in India, Rabish Kumar's phrase, they are getting educated in WhatsApp University. They start believing all the trash that's put out on the social media because they've been deprived of quality education. So it's part of those bigger social economic and political structures which in a sense have widened and sharpened inequalities and can continue to do so. Thank you, Siril and Paranjeev. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.