‘FB, Twitter can curb fake news, if they want to’

Illustration/Uday Mohite

On May 19, a couple of days before Twitter marked BJP national spokesperson Sambit Patra's tweet on the now controversial "Congress toolkit" as "manipulated media", Pratik Sinha of the fact-checking website AltNews, had already put out a story on how this "toolkit" was created on a forged letterhead.

The document allegedly prepared by the All India Congress Committee (AICC) had two parts to it - first, a four-page COVID-19 "toolkit", titled, Cornering Narendra Modi and BJP on COVID-19 mismanagement, and another "four pages of research" on issues with the Rs 20,000-crore Central Vista Redevelopment project that looks to rebuild Parliament House, residences for the PM and VP, and administrative offices from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Apart from Patra, several BJP ministers and leaders, including Smriti Irani, Piyush Goyal, Rajyavardhan Rathore, Anurag Thakur and Dr Harsh Vardhan, had amplified the #CongressToolKitExposed tweet.

While AICC Research Department chairman Rajeev Gowda had told AltNews that the first part of the document had been forged, and that the original "Central Vista research" had been a total of six pages and not four, Sinha and his team did a simultaneous fact-check. On comparing the "toolkit" and Vista research, they were able to identify clear discrepancies in the "letterheads" and "header and footer" font. They later shared a detailed report about this, on their website.

The document that was allegedly prepared by the AICC, and which was shared by BJP leaders on Twitter, comprised "four pages of research" on issues with the Rs 20,000 crore Central Vista Redevelopment project that looks to rebuild Parliament House, and other administrative offices from India Gate to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Pic/Nishad Alam

When Twitter finally flagged Patra's tweet on May 21, Sinha called out the social media platform for its arbitrary move. "Why has Twitter decided to mark those particular posts as ‘Manipulated Media'? That is the question any user will have when they see that tag, but there's no answer to it. How did Twitter determine? Have they provided a reference to their findings for their users?" he wrote, in a series of tweets.

The most pertinent issue he raised was the work of fact-checkers like him, who "debunk misinformation, on all sides of the ideological spectrum, every single day and very often of the kind where original media has been manipulated." "Twitter doesn't mark those…"

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Even as Sinha and his team continue to unearth new material related to the "toolkit" issue, neither Twitter nor the BJP government has been able to provide valid proof for their claims about the manipulation and the toolkit. Instead, an ugly war is now brewing: It began with police presence at Twitter's offices in Delhi and Gurugram last week, and quickly escalated into a warning from the Centre, asking all big tech companies to comply with their fresh IT rules, the deadline for which ended on May 26. Twitter, on the other hand, has raised concerns about threat to free speech.

Govindraj Ethiraj, Pankaj Jain and Karthik Srinivasan

For fake news crusaders and fact-checkers, this ongoing war has little purpose or meaning, if it doesn't help stem the growing tide of disinformation, more problematic in the post-pandemic world.

‘Today, we are fighting disinformation alongside COVID-19," says Pankaj Jain, a computer engineer-turned entrepreneur, who launched the fact-checking portal SMHoaxSlayer, in August 2015. "When I started out, fake news was yet to take on a communal or political colour, at least. It was just comforting lies - like NASA releasing an aerial photo of India celebrating Diwali, or UNESCO declaring India's national anthem, the best in the world," he remembers.

Taking inspiration from fact-checking organisations in the West, Jain launched SMHoaxSlayer on Facebook. Six years on, he says, that the fake news network has exploded.

"We have long moved from misinformation. Now, it's about disinformation." Explaining the difference between the two, he says that while misinformation is false news that's communicated without a real intention to deceive, disinformation includes stories manufactured with the sole purpose of spreading lies, to push forth an agenda. On an average, Jain, currently a one-man show, tackles around five to 10 fake viral posts daily. "When it comes to tweets or posts of prominent persons, I always archive it or do a video recording, because screenshots are not valid proof."

Govindraj Ethiraj, founder of IndiaSpend and FactChecker.in, who in 2018 was awarded the McNulty Prize for improving public discourse and transparency in India by debunking fake news, says that most of the big tech platforms have always had a "very libertarian approach to freedom of speech". "They assume that everyone wants that. But [over the years] they too, have been forced to change."

He says that when one looks at the evolution of most big social media platforms, the early years were fairly smooth. "At least, the first eight to nine years, were really about doing good, like connecting people, helping trace lost friends, kick-starting initiatives. That was the beautiful part of it." It's only recently, where people have started using these platforms for not-so-noble objectives, he thinks. "One could argue that since the tech platforms started this, they should have seen this coming. It's a fair accusation. But then, I also know that people are always smarter than the platform. It's like building a road - the builder can never be in absolute control of how this road is going to be used."

Ethiraj started IndiaSpend 10 years ago to use open data to inform public understanding on a range of issues, and improve accountability in governance. But, having realised that there was also the need to fact-check statements being made by people in public life, he launched a dedicated initiative called FactChecker.in, by 2014. The surge of fake news on end-to-end encrypted platforms like WhatsApp and Twitter, he says, necessitated the need to start BOOM Live, an online resource to fight misinformation.

The changing nature of social media led many tech platforms to employ technology that went against their "libertarian" stance. "When Saddam Hussein was hanged in 2006, the video of his execution went viral on YouTube. Today, that video won't even last five seconds there. Most platforms have now acknowledged that it's their role and responsibility to also police their platform to ensure there is no unsavoury content. They have also invested hugely into making that possible." But, despite all their efforts, Ethiraj feels, they are still just about catching up.

Sinha adds, "If you even compare the average number of employees on these tech platforms to offer support per million of population, it's not enough."

Sinha, who launched AltNews in 2016, says that until 2020, India was predominantly known for political disinformation. "But now, we are struck by a double whammy. With a raging pandemic, there's a crazy amount of medical misinformation, which can be potentially dangerous. People are so insecure that they are willing to try anything and everything. This kind of misinformation is not easily manageable, and despite our consistent efforts, we haven't even touched the tip of the problem."

There are a string of new conditions and regulatory requirements, which the government has sought to impose on social media companies. Some of them include having a chief compliance officer in India to respond to government demands and needs whenever required, and a grievance redressal officer, whom social media users will be able to approach directly.

Companies like WhatsApp have been asked to ensure that they can trace a message to the original sender, which effectively means breaking the end-to-end encryption and privacy on messages.

Jain feels that tech platforms like Twitter will need to develop effective mechanisms and adopt a similar rigour like fact-checkers if they really want to fight disinformation. Sinha agrees. "They need to be more transparent and consistent. They can't act like overlords, waking up once every few months to mark a particular set of posts or videos on their platform as ‘manipulated media,' and then go back to sleep."

He admits that social media platforms in India have enormous issues. "But, my problem is also that the government's intentions [with the new IT rules] are not genuine. They also have been asleep the whole time - the only reason they are now charging at Twitter is because a right-wing account got called out."

Karthik Srinivasan, an independent communications consultant, feels that all platforms, not just Twitter, "can play a very effective role in curbing both misinformation and disinformation, if they want to". "But because they want to be treated merely as an intermediary, any effort they make… may be seen as one where the Langford is taking on a more active role to edit the content posted by users."

Instead of editing or removing content, Srinivasan suggests that all platforms add verification tags, as opposed to a "manipulated tag," which induces more questions than answers, especially when there's no evidence on why the tag is added. "An additional tag that sets such content [for dated information, dis/misinformation, wrongful attribution etc.] would make people take note of it within the platform and avoid rampant spread of wrong information. But, this requires intent, set-up, execution and scaling up, on behalf of the platforms - they consider this a non-essential task right now," he says.

Only last year, Twitter tested new prompts for its platform - the "reply prompt" asked people to reconsider a possibly offensive reply and the "article prompt" where it asks you if you may want to read the article before retweeting it. "I think this is a good step by Twitter," says Srinivasan. "These prompts cannot be compared to either censorship or withholding/removal of tweets for legal reasons, because they are merely nudges, where people have the freedom to ignore the prompt and say what they wanted, the way they want." But, what's most interesting about this, says Srinivasan, is that Twitter is taking on the role of nudging the users "to do the right thing".