Of Engagement, New Accounts in New Kashmir, the Mainland and Around the world
Of Engagement, New Accounts in New Kashmir, the Mainland and Around the world
MisDisMal-Information Edition 12
What is this?This newsletter aims to track information disorder largely from an Indian perspective. It will also look at some global campaigns and research
What this is not?A fact-check newsletter. There are organisations like Altnews, Boomlive etc who already do some great work. It may feature some of their fact-checks periodically
This edition may be shorter than usual since I was forced to spend most of the week away from screens and couldn't spend as much time on research as I would have wanted.
Welcome to Edition #12 of MisDisMal-Information.
To Engage or Not to Engage?
I spend a lot an awful lot of time going on and on about amplification. From some of my past rants, it might seem that there choosing to engage in such situations is a simple binary choice. Today, I want to demonstrate that it isn't.
No-Corona-No
Pragya Thakur and chanting COVID-19 away. Surely the BJP MP isn't the only one wishing the pandemic away, but this case is actually quite interesting. She released a video, coinciding with an impending locking in Bhopal, calling on people to recite a particular holy verse for 5 days as part of the fight against COVID-19
Now if you recall that she also suggested that drinking cow urine would cure cancer, it is not hard to understand why this was met with ridicule.
Correcting medical misinformation is extremely important, especially when we've witnessed first-hand the dangers of it in the midst of a pandemic, so this claim needed to be addresed. While wrapping up though, she does say (rough translation) "this is our prayer to God ...". I raise that, because ignoring this part of the video paved the way for the MP and her supporters to play the victim (see this post by OpIndia. So it simultaneously brings up the question of how much and what kind of attention such statements/claims should be accorded.
Tweet-Bait
A twitter handle that goes by Squint Neon made the claim that Deepika Padukone was paid INR 5 Crore to attend a JNU protest in the aftermath. He also tagged Swara Bhaskar in the tweet shot down the claim.
Important as it is to call out such dubious claims, look at the engagement with that tweet as per Hoaxy.
This tweet is now among the accounts top liked and retweeted ones. It is, of course, impossible to put a number on how much of this engagement was a result of that quote tweet, but it certainly played a part when you consider that Ms. Bhaskar has over 40x the number of followers.
Thanks for splainin'
Breitbart put out a video of a group of doctors claiming that HCL is a "cure of COVID". Kevin Roose, who makes great use of Crowdtangle, was quick to latch on to this.
And while Facebook did take it down, the lessons of Plandemic should remind us how difficult it is to actually ensure such content stays offline. It should also worry us that it got 2x the amount of engagement that the former got over days, in just a few hours.
One of the doctors involved had her video retweeted by Donald Trump and shared by Donald Trump Jr. The latter even his account locked for 12 hours by Twitter, while the original tweet itself was also removed from the platform. Brandy Zadrozy and Ben Collins suspect a coordinated push is behind the virality of the video.
Oh and one of the doctors involved (the same one whose tweets were removed) is seemingly loving the attention.
Even Madonna got in on it. 🤦♂️
Flying over the context
To close this section out, let's go over to Kashmir. A twitter user claimed that first pilot to fly the Rafale jets that arrived in India last week was from Kashmir.
This claim would eventually be fact-checked, however as a result of a tagging some prominent names in the thread, some of them did amplify it.
I should point out that this tweet itself is not inaccurate, the person in the photo is identified correctly, but this tweet is preceded by the one with the false claim (in which Barkha Dutt was tagged too). Something that’s easy to miss, but causes information pollution nevertheless.
Naya Kashmir and New Accounts
Since we're on the topic of Kashmir, on 28th July, a twitter handle put out a call for a tweetstorm on 1st August to "celebrate 1 year of Naya Kashmir".
While this tweet didn't get any significant traction, the hashtag did indeed trend for a significant amount of time on August 1st (not hard to guess why). There were a few other similar tweets between 28th and 31st, but they got even less traction (See search results page on Twitter.
One of them used this profile image - Posing Girl Standing on the stairs
Another used this image from a service called Cupid Knot.
Both of these appear to be stock photos, which is why I've actually linked to them.
Needless to say, that I was intrigued. So I decided to pull some tweets using that hashtag on 1st August. In all, I got around 16K tweets with ~7200 accounts participating in it.
Now, instead of sorting the base data for this chart by number of tweets in descending order as I normally do, I decided to take a different approach this time. The chart is sorted by number of followers in descending order. Notice how the number of tweets trends higher to the right side of the chart (lower number of followers). I should add that by itself, this is not necessarily suspicious. Multiple pieces need to fit (or rather not fit) together before we can conclude that there was something strange at work.
Next, I looked at the top 1% of accounts in terms of tweets - and plotted their creation dates.
That July 2020 circle is pretty big, isn't it? 🤔.
I also filtered this for accounts created in the last 3 months.
1 - Profile image appears to belong a Pashto Poet. Users most Retweeted identified by Twitonomy also appear to be using dubious profile images (mainly stock images but some celebrity images too).
2 - Obviously Right leaning, and a significant amount of interaction with parody handles, but nothing too obvious.
3 - Profile image of an actor that portrayed the role of a Turkish historical figure with the same name. I'll just let Mr. Johnson sum it up
Let's dial back a bit though, the top 5 accounts in terms of followers also means that once they tweeted, a lot of the activity would have been on auto-pilot or organic - or in other words, just another Wednesday on Twitter. These are all public figures/journalists, so I don't think there is any risk in including their screen names
Meanwhile, in Mainland India
More apps were banned (47) and many more are being monitored (~275). And this quote from ET is what prompted me write about India breaking the Internet, and not in a good way. This should explain the sub-heading for this section
Another senior govt official told ET that the govt is looking to formalise a process for such bans and the concerned ministry has been asked to frame a law or circular or some form of a regulation for constant scrutiny of the apps operating in India. “A set of rules or defined procedures may take time but is the correct process to go about it in the future,” the person said.
A Gurgaon court issued summons to Jack Ma after a former employee of UC Web (owned by Alibaba) approached it saying he was terminated for opposing 'censorship' and 'fake news'.
Ernakulum rural police has upped its social media surveillance with the aim of curbing the spread of 'fake news'.
If you recall the News 18 Tamil Nadu story from Edition 11, here's a quick update, the channel has taken a YouTuber to court.
In the petition, Gunasekaran and Jeeva Sagapthan said Maridhas has not only resorted to the agenda of publicly defaming and spreading fake news against them but has also spoken about their personal lives without any verification or comments from them.
Staying with the Mardras HC, Aroon Deep writes in Medianama about a petition asking for pre-censorship of Social Media and OTT platforms.
In Manipur, police have filed a sedition case against an activist (Erendro Leichombam) allegedly for Facebook posts about Sanajaoba Leishemba, a newly-elected Rajya Sabha MP and the titular king of the state.
In the image, Leishemba is seen bowing down with his hands folded in front of Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The picture has been captioned “Minai macha”, which roughly translates to “son of a servant”.
Bibi Netanyahu's son apologised after tweeting an image of..er..well.. read the description.
In his latest gaffe, the younger Netanyahu shared a Twitter image of Goddess Durga superimposed with the face of Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit and the tiger superimposed with that of prosecutor Liat Ben Ari, who are both investigating an ongoing corruption case involving his father. Below the photo was a caption in Hebrew that read: “Know your place you despicable people”. The deity’s arms were morphed to show the middle finger.
In a rather ridiculous twitter exchange, BJP and AAP argued with each other over the use of CamScanner.
In Edition 11, we covered Twitter's offer to 'disable' 2 tweets by Prashant Bhushan. Well, it turns out they went ahead and did just that (without any court order). And a number retired judges urged the Supreme Court to reconsider the sub moto contempt proceedings against him.
Linkedin suspended the account of an Angel Investor for posts against Byjus
LinkedIn apparently had this to say, in response to questions from Entrackr:
“LinkedIn is committed to keeping our platform safe, trusted and professional. We have clear terms of service and professional community policies that we expect all of our members to adhere to. We can confirm that this account has been restricted and cannot comment further on member accounts due to our privacy policy.”
Harini Calamur writes about the 'gradual taming' of social media. She concludes:
... as advertisers demand a more conducive environment to exhibit their products – it is likely that the communities of hate that did so much to build web 2.0 will disappear from the main platforms. And, that can only be a good thing.
Big Tech Watch
As the clock tiktoks on
TikTok's woes continue, with Donald Trump threatening to ban the app via an executive order (called it!). And Reuters reports that ByteDance may agree to divest all its in the US business
ByteDance was previously seeking to keep a minority stake in the U.S. business of TikTok, which the White House had rejected. Under the new proposed deal, ByteDance would exit completely and Microsoft Corp would take over TikTok in the United States, the sources said.
TikTok also accused Facebook of disguising its attacks on the former in patriotism.
TikTok's General Manager for North America put out a message saying that the company is not planning on going anywhere.
One thing that is instructive is the contrast in Twitter and TikTok's approach to dealing with the American government v/s the Indian government.
We don't need no regulation
You've likely read plenty about the Anti-trust hearing already, and I will admit that I have not quite caught up with it yet. So I'm just going to share 2 related links here.
A Washington post article characterising Democrat and Republican questions:
But, mostly, the Democrats focused on big questions about the power these companies have amassed, even if they really weren’t all that interested in hearing the executives’ answers. The Republicans were far more concerned about Google and how it’s unfair to conservatives. Google suppresses conservative voices. Google sends Republicans’ fundraising emails to spam. Google is anti-American.
And Zeynep Tufekci's oblique reference to the language that tech CEO's were likely to use.
My moderation is bigger than your moderation
Sarah Frier contracts Facebook and Twitter's approach to moderating political speech.
In an interview with the guardian, Yael Eisenstat (Facebook's former head of election integrity operations) talks about the platform being 'ripe for manipulation and viral misinformation'.
Abby Ohlheiser writes about why it fact-checks and account bans won't work against QAnon. If you switch out the setting, this can easily apply to the India context Plus, Shayan Sardarizadeh put out a thread regarding QAnon's reach on Facebook.
Around the world
Five Egyptian women were sentenced on Monday to two years in prison for posting "indecent" content on TikTok.
According. to the Times, these kinds of prosecutions occur when lawyers file criminal cases that accuse women of "inciting debauchery" or "spreading fake news," and that public prosecutors are empowered by a 2018 cybercrimes law that allows for prison sentences and fines for "digital content deemed to violate public morals."
In Pakistan, the government has finalised a policy to deal with COVID-19 information disorder.
The minister, according to the press release, further said that people who were involved in such actions were not “pro-country”.
4 people were arrested under Hong Kong's new National Security Law.
NYT's Anton Troianovski writes about StopFake - a Ukranian fact-checking outfit and the criticism it has come under. This quote by Baybars Orsek, Director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) sums up the quandary rather well.
“They are working in a country where they are still practically in war with Russia,” Mr. Örsek said of StopFake. “This is a question we also struggle with as fact checkers: How do you do nonpartisan fact-checking when you have tanks on the street?”
More to read
FirstDraft's 3-part series on the psychology of misinformation
Harvard Kennedy Center's essay on social engagement metrics and their role in information disorder
Our findings suggest that the display of social engagement metrics can strongly influence interaction with low-credibility information. The higher the engagement, the more prone people are to sharing questionable content and less to fact checking it.
These findings imply that social media platforms must rethink how engagement metrics should be displayed such that they do not facilitate the spread of misinformation or hinder the spread of legitimate information.