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.
Welcome to Edition 30 of MisDisMal-Information
A few images/gifs in this edition. So if you are blocking images in your mail client, I recommend viewing this in a browser (or downloading content for this edition).
Whose time is it anyway?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been asked this question on more that one occasion > Do internet shutdowns help in addressing information disorder as various governments claim they do?
While a part of me just wants to say:
The truth is that this isn’t a simple yes and no question. Let’s go back to the illustration I used in the last edition depicting level of obstruction v/s control over information flows, and 2 other block diagrams I like to use to illustrate how internet shutdowns play out.
We’ve established that Internet Shutdowns score high on the potential of obstruction axis, and can go a long way in control over information/narrative flows. But it is important to square that along with what happens when they are used. With the initial shock ALL information (good quality information, low quality information, misleading information) flow that requires internet connectivity is affected. But, with prolonged application or repeated usage the ‘bad actors’, that are meant to be affected, will evolve to account for such measures. And those affected will largely be your ‘average person’.
So, the key questions that one needs to answer are:
a) The relative costs/benefits imposed by cutting off ALL information flow over the internet for ALL people v/s disrupting the flow of ‘some’ information to a subset of people?
b) And what costs are being imposed on ALL people over a period of time.
Note that here, I am referring to ‘costs’ in the economic sense - it basically boils down how much pain/disruption people are being put through.
So, let’s attempt to answer that question for Haryana. Now, we can’t measure the actual pain or economic impact, but a reasonable proxy would be to try and understand the number of hours of connectivity that have been impacted.
This is an estimate, and attempt to put some sort of quantifiable number. I am certain that it is not perfect and the methodology can be improved by smarter people. My goal was to keep this as simple as possible.
Here’s what I did.
I took district-wise Census 2011 data for Haryana.
From TRAI’s quarterly performance report, I took the reported number for “the number of internet subscribers per 100 people”. For the service area of Haryana (across rural and urban areas) this was ~61. Service area of Haryana excluded Gurgaon and Faridabad, which as per TRAI report sections on Teledensity are a part of the Delhi service area.
Unfortunately, these orders weren’t diligently uploaded to the state government’s home department’s website - so I tried to piece this information together from articles (1 and 2), internetshutdowns.in and the ‘Official Twitter handle of Directorate of Information, Public Relations and Languages Department, Haryana’ [that’s right].
I assumed 2 hours of mobile internet usage per day. This meant that for every 24 hours of internet restrictions, I assumed that 2 hours of connectivity was impacted. Industry research suggests 2-3 hours of daily internet usage.
As of writing this, the orders are in effect in 3 districts till 5 PM on Feb 5th.
So, across the various districts, between 26th January 2021 and Feburary 5th, 2021 - what was this number?
Estimate: Around 100-110 million hours of impacted connectivity in the service area of Haryana alone.
Whose time is it anyway?
In the spirit of ‘show your work’:
Here is a published Notion Page that details the analysis.
A Google Sheet that I used to arrive at the estimate.
Oh, and before anyone says ‘But wired connections were still working’ - they are only 1.6% of the number of internet subscribers. And you can’t even assume that every wired connection is internet enabled.
Postscript: As I was writing this edition, news trickled in that the internet restrictions in Jammu and Kashmir were being revoked after 551 days.
India Against PropOganda
I tried really hard to pun on a Rihanna song title for this section, but my brain just wouldn’t w…
Ok, so you already know where I am going with this.
Let’s recap:
Rihanna, Greta Thunberg and many other celebrities/activists/influencers/politicians tweeted either in favour of the farmer protests are against the manner in which government authorities were responding to them. Remember what I said about us being at the receiving end of the wrong kind of attention.
For reasons, unknown, the Ministry of External Affairs chose to respond - essentially terming it ‘interference in internal affairs’. Many were surprised that the MEA even responded to it, but if you’re a regular reader here - you shouldn’t be too surprised (I mean it!)
Now, this was alleged to be part of a foreign conspiracy to malign India - and the way to respond to it was coordinated tweeting using hashtags IndiaTogether, IndiaAgainstPropaganda and… an incorrectly spelled IndiaAgainstPropOganda (which I analysed, but I’ll come to that in a bit).
A host of Indian celebrities too, put out content using the same hashtags with some variation of a message that it was an ‘internal matter’. Even the Indian Embassy in Congo got into the act.
Sachin Tendulkar joins 'India against propaganda' drive after Rihanna, Greta Thunberg extend support to farmers' protest #IndiaTogether #IndiaAgainstPropaganda @sachin_rt @IndianDiplomacyIndia’s sovereignty cannot be compromised. External forces can be spectators but not participants. Indians know India and should decide for India. Let's remain united as a nation. #IndiaTogether #IndiaAgainstPropagandaSachin Tendulkar @sachin_rtA lot more happened, including Greta Thunberg tweeting, then deleting and then again tweeting (an updated version of) a ‘toolkit’. The existence of which was used a proof of this conspiracy. It was enough for the Delhi Police to lodge an FIR against the creators of the toolkit - which was initially misreported as an FIR against Thunberg (indeed the incorrect version made it to a number of newsletters the following morning). All this while, the protests continued of course. But you’re not here for the news.
The team of Dibyendu Mishra, Syeda Zainab Akbar, Arshia Arya, Saloni Dash, Rynaa Grover, Joyojeet Pal put out some interesting analysis based on this.
I recommend reading through it but some key points stood out to me
The seemingly coordinated tweets.
The nature of abuse.
As much news reporting has already shown, there has been significant use of racist language against Rihanna following her tweet. While the nationality of the key persons involved in the issue (Rihanna, Greta Thunberg, Amanda Cerny, Meena Harris) has been raised significantly in the “interference from outsiders” arguments put forth, there is little doubt that the key opponents being women is a central part of the counterattack from those opposed.
Related: Mapping out Violence Against Women of Influence on Twitter by Priya Kumar, Anatoliy Gruzd, and Philip Mai based on analysis of ~900K tweets over 1 month mentioning one from a set of 101 influential women in India.
Lots of accounts gained followers (irrespective of which side of the issue they were on) -> going back to social media incentives and their impact on the nature of discourse.
While our results do not conclusively prove causality, we see that across both sides of the issue, there is an increase in following of the accounts irrespective of their stance. We selected a subset of the accounts that received a lot of attention during the engagement around the issue. From this subset, the highest increase in following have been for the Ministry of External Affairs (@meaindia) and Mia Khalifa (@miakhalifa), both of which had in excess of an 1581% (more than 15 times what they typically add in two days) increase over their average daily increase in following for the period just preceding the incident.
The evolving identity aspect (which is not surprising since that identity is being targeted):
The more important trend came from a number of Indian-origin public figures from various other parts of the world, particularly British and North American entertainers of Punjabi origin including Lilly Singh, Jazzy B, Ammy Virk, Nav, Rupi Kaur, Panjabi by Nature, Gurinder Chaddha etc. This in part aligns with the support for the farmers’ cause within that constituency, which has also been successful in getting political representatives from areas with significant Punjabi populations including Manchester (Yasmin Qureshi), Ontario (Gurratan Singh), and the California central valley (US Rep Jim Costa) tweeting about the Farmer protests.
Aside: Some twitter users managed to some screenshots of someone as they were editing the eventually deleted toolkit that Greta Thunberg posted, identified the account across multiple social networks. As of now, many of the accounts no longer exist.
Ok, now let’s come to the IndiaAgainstPropOganda hashtag. I deliberately picked this one since it implied some careless tweeting (yes, I know that’s a loaded assumption).
I was able to extract around 50K tweets. And again, of dates on which the most accounts were created, the last few days featured prominently. And once again, these did not drive a lot of engagement.
But just by looking at the hashtags and posting frequency of these at random, their direction seems evident. Someone, though, is clearly not getting their money’s worth int terms of engagement.
Union Government of India v/s Twitter
Normally, this would have been in the ‘Meanwhile in India’ section but this has been one crazy week.
Fortunately, Pranav Dixit has a good 1 paragraph summary in his report on the aftermath [BuzzFeedNews].
On Monday, Twitter complied with the government’s order and prevented people in India from viewing more than 250 accounts belonging to activists, political commentators, a movie star, and the Caravan, an investigative news magazine. Most accounts had criticized Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, and his government. But the company restored the accounts approximately six hours later after a Twitter lawyer met with IT ministry officials, and argued that the tweets and accounts constituted free speech and were newsworthy.
It got crazier from there.
India’s government disagreed. On Tuesday, the IT ministry sent a notice to Twitter, ordering it to block the accounts once again. It also threatened people who work at Twitter's Indian arm with legal consequences, which could include a fine or a jail term of up to seven years.
Most of these accounts are still accessible. Though, accounts some have been suspended [TOI]
Twitter has once again suspended or withheld the accounts of some users associated with the farmers' agitation. At least three accounts - Sanyukt Kisan Morcha's official IT cell Kisan Ekta Morcha, Tractor2Twitter and BKU (Ekta-Ugrahan) - are among those which have been suspended.
Predictably, calls to block Twitter in India have resurfaced (assuming they died down anyway). I didn’t pick up any trends about Tooter this time though. I don’t know if there is a link to:
Big Tech-lomacy
How do you distinguish between lobbying and diplomacy?
In fairly long writeup on ‘digital foreign policy’ Jovan Kurbalija says:
Furthermore, Big Tech’s economic power is intertwined with its ‘social power’, as tech platforms have deep insights about how society functions, from people’s purchasing patterns and personal habits, to their political preferences.
Aware of this power shift, many governments have started engaging the tech industry by, for example, establishing a new kind of diplomatic representation in the Bay Area, Bangalore, and other centres of digital dynamism across the world (see: ‘Where?’ section).
As for tech companies, there has also been a noticeable shift from traditional corporate lobbying to more long-term participation in diplomacy.
I’m no IR guru, so I look at this rather simplistically. In their bid to have good ‘diplomatic’ relations with one country/or a set of countries + manage public perception as they try to enforce a common set of rules across them and balance that with adhering to local law + create shareholder value - there are going to be conflicts. Plus, countries are going to try and exert pressure on them too.
We just went over India v/s Twitter, but the recent past is littered with examples of company v/s country ’stand-offs’. Or countries v/s people (via platforms), here is a small list of some of the ongoing ones.
In last week’s edition we covered the back-and-forth between Uganda and Facebook.
After the coup in Myanmar, Facebook banned a Myanmar military television network page [Newley Purnell, WSJ]. Then, Facebook itself was reportedly blocked [Manish Singh, TechCrunch].
After the Mexican President accused the head of Twitter Mexico of being aligned with an opposition party, it responded via a Twitter thread. [Justin Villamil, Bloomberg].
The long-running Facebook and Google vs Australia (and Microsoft?) over its proposed media bargaining code. [Asha Barbaschow - ZDNET]
Pakistan’s Telecom Authority has managed to get both Apple and Google to take down apps made by members of the Ahmadiyya community citing its anti-blasphemy law. It also wants to shutdown operated in the US. [Megha Rajagoplan - Buzzfeed News]
And I am not getting into TikTok v/s Trump and Huawei’s many issues, or even the corporate disinformation campaigns (Huawei, Viettel and Mytel).
Meanwhile in India
Delhi Police registered 4 FIRs against social media accounts for ‘spreading fake news’. One has even been arrested.
Yet another plea in the Supreme Court which has something to do ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech’
Police in J&K have filed an FIR against wo portals, The Kashmir Walla and The Kashmiriyat based on a complaint by the army, for, what else, ‘fake news’[TheWire].
It seems to be different states are competing with each other. Uttarakhand’s entry:
Uttarakhand police will now scrutinise social media behaviour of those putting “anti-national” posts on such sites and may not clear verification for passport or arms licence if they are found to doing it habitually, state director general of police Ashok Kumar said on Tuesday.
Benjamin Strick on another copypasta campaign supporting the BJP.
Shephali Bhatt, for ET on the ‘black market’ for ‘blue ticks’
Now, blue ticks are being sold on private marketplaces. Individuals and agencies are offering social media verificationservices for a fee — from Rs 30,000 to Rs 1 lakh in India and many times higher for users in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.
False claims from the Anti-CAA protests are being recycled. [TheQuint]
Facebook’s-but-not-Facebook’s Oversight board hasn’t released its verdict on the case pertaining to content from India yet. On 28th January, it had said that the decision will published in ‘the coming days’. Well, days have come…and gone.
Big Tech Watch
Content Moderation through lawsuits. Dominion is asking platforms to preserve posts by certain users in relation to its (impending) defamation lawsuits.
Dominion continues its transformation into the nation's most effective content moderation service with a side business in voting machines.Dominion just sent letters to the social platforms asking them to preserve posts, and offered a glimpse at their target list: https://t.co/W3WzepFgiLBen Smith @benytSome updates on Birdwatch,
Mike Masnik writes for Techdirt
Will this work? There are many, many reasons why it might not. Wikipedia itself has spent years dealing with these kinds of questions, and had to build a kind of shared culture and informal and formal rules about what kind of content belongs on the site. It's a lot harder to retrofit that kind of thinking back onto a platform like Twitter where pretty much anything goes. There is, also, of course, the risk of brigading and mobs -- whereby a crew of people might attack a certain tweet or type of information with the goal of getting accurate information being declared "fake news" or something along those lines.
…
Some of the initial results, however... don't look great. A bunch of clueless Trumpists have been trying to minimize the traumatic experience that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently described as her experience during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.
In a somewhat detailed explainer for FirstDraft, Madelyn Webb and Bethan John list the type of problems.
Brigading
Bias and Discrimination
Labour Concerns
Priotising salacious content
They also provide some statistics on early usage.
The most current data First Draft’s researchers analyzed provided information on 1,425 notes left on 1,081 unique tweets. Seventy-three percent of those notes marked tweets as “misinformed or potentially misleading” and 27 percent as “not misleading.”
…
Only 512 unique users left notes on Birdwatch in the data provided, and more than 85 percent of the 1,081 Birdwatched tweets in the dataset contain only one note, making upvoting and downvoting moot. Until the user base grows, it’s hard to say how effective Birdwatch will be.
Aliaksandr Herasimenka lists 5 recent academic studies on Telegram.
Alicia Wanless writes that EU’s Digital Services Act should be looking to facilitate permanent collaboration between academia and industry. And just to highlight how lop-sided the current state is, Johan Farkas put out a thread in late Jan based on a lit review (along with Ariadna M.F) of 104 academic articles examining racism, hate speech and social media. Unsurprisingly Twitter, U.S. and text-based analysis were over represented.