Of Voice, Loyalty, Sticks, Flag-elation, Flagellation and Seeing Clearly
MisDisMal-Information 40
What is this? MisDisMal-Information (Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation) aims to track information disorder and the information ecosystem 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.
Welcome to Edition 40 of MisDisMal-Information
Voice, Loyalty and Stick
The situation in Gaza is quite grim. Even with the ceasefire, there’s no way around that. One thing that has been notable to watch, though, is the mobilisation of support for Palestinians.
From Social Media is the Mass Protest (NYTimes)
“It feels different this time, it definitely does,” said Amani Al-Khatahtbeh , 29, the Palestinian-Jordanian-American founder of MuslimGirl.com, whose posts on the topic have been ubiquitous across social media over the past week. “I wasn’t expecting this to happen so quickly, and for the wave to shift this fast. You don’t see many people out on the streets in protest these days, but I would say that social media is the mass protest.”
In a recently published paper about the Farmer Protests in India, based on a framework that looks at mobilisations through the lens of identity, network and immediate causes, I wrote about a network based on ‘liberal bonds’. For context, the network aspect is relevant because it helps a movement scale.
Third, an existing ecosystem of groups/individuals that self-identify as liberals. This network is held together by ‘liberal bonds’. The bonds within this grouping can vary from weak to strong in terms of strength and have formed over years of iterative engagement on and off social media platforms. Nevertheless, interaction over social media platforms is essential in this network’s width and mobilising potential. Boundaries of this network are not well-defined as participants can voice support or exit depending on causes, though they are hardening over time.
Here’s how I had attempted to define ‘liberal’ since it is used in many ways in regular discourse. This is not comprehensive by any stretch, but I think you’ll get an idea of where I am coming from.
The third identity relates to individuals/groups/entities who self-identify as ‘Liberal’. This label is often attributed/misattributed in contemporary discourse. However, in this paper, the term is not meant as a complimentary or pejorative descriptor. It aims to capture a broad identity-type that classifies its own political identity as favouring individual rights and social justice in opposition to what it considers state support for majoritarianism, exclusion, chauvinism, and discrimination. This identity group broadened the support base for the movement.
There are shades of this around the support for the Palestinian cause as well as many of the same voices that supported BlackLivesMatters, MeToo, StopAsianHate (in the U.S.), and anti-CAA, Farmer protests (in India) have called out Israeli aggression. The fluidity of boundaries is evident, though, since not all voices are unequivocal. From the same NYT article:
Perhaps an even more telling measure of the online fervor was the backlash awaiting the singer Rihanna, who, under normal circumstances, can do no wrong in fans’ eyes, when she condemned “the violence I’m seeing displayed between Israel and Palestine!” drawing accusations that she was equating the two sides’ actions and the consequences. Sample reply: “You sounded like ‘all lives matter.’”
And the backlash seems to be an indication of the hardening or a call for consistency, depending on how you look at it (i.e. if you don’t stick together, you may get the stick. This is also why I dropped the exit from exit, voice and loyalty, and replaced it with a stick).
There’s certainly an upside to this dynamic. A loose coalition of sorts that comes together for a ‘just’ cause. Going back to the paper:
With the identity-based networks transcending international boundaries due to various interacting identity-types and global information flows enabled in particular by social media platforms, encrypted messaging services, such networked protests immediately capture attention across the world. Thus, states should expect greater scrutiny and sharper criticism of their response to it, as well as their track record of dealing with similar movements in the past.
Such mobilisation is extraordinary. Yet, the fact that one needs to rely on the extraordinary is an indication that the ordinary is failing for any number of reasons.
And, just as there is a coalition for a just cause, there can be an opposing one for a cause it believes to be ‘just’ too. Another thing that seemed evident during the farmer protests was a counter-movement that sprung up in response to support for the protests. There are shades of that here, too, as right-wing groups (even in India) have supported (and cheer-led) Israel’s actions. This creates a dynamic conflict between these networks. From the paper (sorry, 2nd last time)
The existing political identity-based networks are always ‘ready-to-go’ and quickly enter into a state of conflict comprised of many simultaneously occurring engagements ranging from well-reasoned, good-faith arguments to whataboutery, ad hominem attacks, sealioning, overstating or minimising perceived harms and outright fabrication/falsif ication of information. These conflicts often overlap resulting in perpetual cycles of mobilisation and counter-mobilisation even as immediate causes shift.
And, there is a risk of flattening too:
Conversely, repeated eruptions of protests with short/no intervals over time can also lead to a flattening of global responses and attention. In which case, the costs of relying on attrition may gradually decrease.
Post-script
If you’re troubled by the reports of tech platforms moderation decisions and ‘glitches’ disproportionately affecting Palestinian users, I recommend reading Jillian York’s book Silicon Values, where she documents a pattern of marginalised populations around the world being affected across aptly titled chapters: Offline Repression Is Replicated Online, Profit over People and Extremism Calls for Extreme Measures.
Flag-elation and Flagellation
Another ‘toolkit’ saga is unfolding as the several right-wing handles posted screenshots of a document allegedly made by the INC. An Altnews fact check by Pooja Chaudhuri and Pratik Sinha contends that one set of screenshots were forged.
On 21st May, Twitter labelled/flagged some tweets containing these screenshots under their ‘manipulated media policy’. This included what appears to be one of the earliest tweets that got significant attention by a handle ‘teambharat_’, as well as some by Sambit Patra and other prominent right-wing accounts. I’ve added these to the Labeled Tweet Repository [Notion] I’ve been manually maintaining since December 2020. After this, the hashtag ‘ManipulatedMedia’ was trending on Twitter for ~12 hours as per Trendinalia[link]. If you hop over and look at the tweets, some were obviously elated (sorry, I had to close out that pun).
The Union government, though, has asked Twitter to remove the labels. We know this only because ‘sources’ have spoken to the media. [Surabhi Agarwal - Economic Times]:
“Such tagging by Twitter appears prejudged, prejudiced and a deliberate attempt to colour the investigation by local law enforcement agencies,” according to official sources who termed Twitter’s action as a “clear overreach, which is totally unwarranted”.
You will recall that it was not so long ago (~ 2 weeks) that the Union Government asked social media platforms to ‘control misinformation and discourage fake news’ in the context of COVID-19 Economic Times].
MediaNama published(paywall) the advisory. I am paraphrasing from the call-to-action section:
1- Run awareness campaigns for users not to upload/circulate false news/misinformation related to COVID-19, which can create panic, disturb public order and social tranquillity
2- Take immediate action to disable /remove such content
3- Promote dissemination of authentic information related to COVID-19 as far as possible.
4- Issue warnings to those misusing platforms ‘indulging’ in such fraudulent activities.
In this particular case, The Internet Freedom Foundation has said that they will be filing an RTI to determine which laws were used as the basis for this.
It will be interesting to see what sort of response they get. In the meanwhile, we’ll probably have to brace ourselves for another round of sabre-rattling between the Indian state and Twitter. And oh, ban Twitter is trending on Koo [archive link] (the archive link has it trending much lower than its no. 3 position on the explore page). There was some activity on the hashtag ‘BanTwitterInIndia’, (rubs eyes), Twitter too. Not the first time, tbh.
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Now, let’s move from flags and elation to flagellation. You’re probably aware that Arvind Kejriwal tweeted about a ‘new form of coronavirus’ in Singapore - for which he faced some backlash [PTI - Economic Times]. Singapore also appears to have invoked its ‘anti-disinformation’ law - POFMA (Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act) [ANI - Business Standard]
The MOH instructed the POFMA Office to issue General Correction Directions to Facebook, Twitter and SPH Magazines Pte Ltd (HardwareZone forum), read MOH statement. Facebook, Twitter and SPH Magazines are required to carry the Correction Notice to all end-users in Singapore who use Facebook, Twitter and HardwareZone.com.
As TheWire reports, Singapore also seems to have considered charging Arvind Kejriwal under the law.
The Singapore envoy then cautioned that his government has considered bringing charges against Kejriwal under a domestic act targeting fake news.
“So, indeed in Singapore, there is an act called the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act known as POFMA. It is meant to mitigate the spread of misinformation, so we reserve the right to invoke POFMA on some of the comments and assertions made by the honourable chief minister on this topic,” Wong said.
The article also points out that there is a clause for extra-territorial application:
There is an extra-territoriality clause in POFMA that allows for action to be taken against a person outside Singapore in case of communication that is “prejudicial to public health, public safety, public tranquillity or public finances” and “incite feelings of enmity, hatred or ill‑will between different groups of persons”, among others.
Now here’s where this gets interesting. In our current information ecosystem, domestic politics and international relations meld together in ways that seem to completely change incentives. There are no internal affairs, or TANIA? Anyway, the union government probably does not want to be seen supporting or defending Arvind Kejriwal in any way (at least, not publicly). Indeed, the MEA and the foreign minister have said that the Delhi CM has ‘no competence to pronounce on COVID variants or aviation policy’ and that ‘[Kejirwal] does not speak for India’.
Politics was always about performance. But, social media dynamics make politics more performative than ever before.
Related: Listed to this Social Media Politics episode on The Cultural Sociology of Political Performance, Icons, and Social Media.
Can we see clearly now…
I am going to end this edition on a sobering note. Evgeny Morozov wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian titled ‘Privacy activists are winning fights with tech giants. Why does victory feel hollow?’.
He makes two observations on the strategy of using privacy transgressions as the centrepiece that really stuck out to me.
That strategy presumed that such legal transgressions would continue in perpetuity. Now that Alphabet – and soon, perhaps, Facebook – are rushing to leverage machine learning to create personalized ads that are also privacy-preserving, one begins to wonder if putting so many critical eggs into the proverbial privacy basket was a wise choice. Terrorized by the ubiquity and eternity of “surveillance capitalism”, have we made it all too easy for technology companies to actually live up to our expectations? And have we wasted a decade of activism that should have been focused on developing alternative accounts of why we should fear big tech?
Something similar is likely to happen in other domains marked by recent moral panics over digital technologies. The tech industry will address mounting public anxieties over fake news and digital addiction by doubling down on what I call “solutionism”, with digital platforms mobilizing new technologies to offer their users a bespoke, secure and completely controllable experience.
The importance of collecting around issues strategically is even more important as the coalition I referenced in the first section gets stronger. There have been sporadic successes with getting tech companies to respond. And as these networks form stronger bonds and get better at working together, they can effect more change.
Just as Morozov referenced privacy, I have concerns about ‘Transparency’ as an end. Now, I am not saying that it shouldn’t be a goal. But I can foresee it easily being distorted into something counterproductive if what comes out of it are (extremely) large data dumps that either no one can make sense of or require a significant amount of investment/effort to do so. And that’s not the only way it can be counter-productive. Think about how live streaming certain proceedings seem to have robbed them of serious/meaningful proceeding and turned them into a contest for social media shareable power snippets (performative politics from the second section ftw). We need to arrive at some sort of agreement on what constitutes ‘meaningful transparency’. It is in quotes because I don’t know what meaningful means in this context.
Post email update:
I had a few thoughts after I scheduled the email, that I felt should go up on the web version of this edition.
Another example of this situation is when we argue that a states/companies doing are ‘xyz’ which doesn't have a legal basis. And while that’s often a legitimate concern, where I think that can fall short is if the discourse fixates on just having a law rather than what said law would allow/disallow (For example, I’ve read countless articles where there’s a passing reference to the fact that India doesn’t have data protection law, and there isn’t always space to get into the nuances of what the bill in its current form will not address, what it will make worse and what it will explicitly allow). Because, and we’ve seen this, we can always a get a badly written law (either intentionally or unintentionally), or it can be interpreted in a way that leads to adverse outcomes, or get yet another law that isn’t implemented/implementable. To be fair, when most people advocating for a legal basis for something, they tend to have some idea of what they would want to see in such a law, though that can get lost in public discourse which, as I said earlier, can become singularly focused on just having one, or nullified in the way it is implemented - and that’s the point I’m zeroing in on.