Facebook Says It Inadvertently Restricted A Hashtag. Now It Needs To Tell Us Exactly How And Why

This article originally appeared on Medianama. An excerpt is reproduced here:

An explanation

The presence of a political context surrounding these cases also raises the question of how Facebook is responding to the possible weaponisation of its community reporting. We know from Facebook’s August 2020 CIB report that it took against a network engaged in mass reporting. What principles does it use to define thresholds for action? How is such coordinated activity that falls below its self-defined threshold of Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour handled? Knowledge about the specifics of thresholds become essential when they make the difference between publicly disclosed and internal actions, as the Sophie Zhang – Guardian series demonstrated in the Indian context.Facebook — this applies to other networks too, but Facebook is by far the largest in India — needs to put forward more meaningful explanations in such cases. Ones that amount to more than ‘Oops!’ or ‘Look! We fixed it!’. There are, after all, no secret blocking rules stopping it from explaining its own mistakes. These explanations don’t have to be immediate. Issues can be complex, requiring detailed analysis. Set a definite timeline, and deliver. No doubt, this already happens for internal purposes. And then, actually show progress. Reduce the trust deficit, don’t feed it.This does raise concerns of being drawn into distracted by narrow content-specific conversations or being distracted by ‘transparency theater’, thereby missing the forest for the trees. These are legitimate risks and need to be navigated carefully. The micro-level focus can be about specific types of content or actions on a particular platform. At the macro-level, it is about impact on public discourse and society. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive and what we learn from one level should inform the others, in pursuit of greater accountability. To read more visit: Facebook says it inadvertently restricted a hashtag. Now it needs to tell us exactly how and why | MediaNama

It’s Not Just About 50 Tweets and One Platform

This article originally appeared in TheWire. An excerpt is reproduced here.Transparency and a voluntary actThis latest attempt came to light because Twitter disclosed this action in the Lumen Database, a project that houses voluntary submissions. And while Twitter is being criticised for complying, reports suggest that the company wasn’t the only one that received such a request. It just happened to be the only one that chose to disclose it proactively.Expanding on legal scholar Jack Balkin’s model for speech regulation, there are ‘3C’s’ available (cooperation, cooption and confrontation) for companies in their interaction with state power. Apart from Twitter’s seemingly short-lived dalliance with confrontation in February 2021, technology platforms have mostly chosen the cooperation and cooption options in India (in contrast to their posturing in the west).This is particularly evident in their reaction to the recent Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code. We’ll ask for transparency, but what we’re likely to get is ‘transparency theatre’ – ranging from inscrutable reports, to a deluge of information which, as communications scholar Sun-ha Hong argues, ‘won’t save us’.Reports allege that the most recent Twitter posts were flagged because they were misleading. But, at the time of writing, it isn’t clear exactly which law(s) were allegedly violated. We can demand that social media platforms are more transparent, but the current legal regime dealing with ‘blocking’ (Section 69A of the IT ACT) place no such obligations on the government. On the contrary, as  lawyers Gurshabad Grover and Torsha Sorkar point out, it enables them to issue ‘secret blocking’ orders. Civil society groups have advocated against these provisions, but the political class (whether in government or opposition) is yet to make any serious attempts to change the status quo. 

Will India experience the fallout of Trump vs Twitter?

This is an extract from the full article which appeared in Deccan Herald.....But before resorting to isomorphic mimicry, it is important to understand what the executive order proposes. The reading suggests that it seeks to narrow the definition of 'good faith' under which a platform can carry out 'Good Samaritan' blocking. Kate Klonick was quoted in Recode as saying that the order was not enforceable and even referred to it is as 'political theatre'. And Daphne Keller published an annotated version of the order in which she classified various sections as 'atmospherics', 'legally dubious', and points on which 'reasonable minds can differ.The current trajectory in India appears to be headed in the opposite direction. A recent PIL in the Supreme Court, filed by a BJP member sought to make it mandatory to link social media accounts with identification. While the petition itself was disposed of, the petitioner was directed to be impleaded in the ongoing Whatsapp Traceability case. The draft Personal Data Protections proposes 'voluntary' verification for social media intermediaries.

Hotstar blocked John Oliver show even before Modi govt could ask. It’s a dangerous new trend

This article was originally published in ThePrint. Censorship in response to moral panic and outrage was the norm, but now in India, we’re even cutting out the middlemen.

When riots were taking place in northeast Delhi and US President Donald Trump was set to land in India, HBO’s popular Sunday night show Last Week Tonight hosted by John Oliver aired an episode on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This episode, however, did not appear on Hotstar’s listings for the show, which is normally updated Tuesday mornings in India (it has still not been added at the time of writing this). International publications like Time magazine and The Economist have been the subject of outrage for carrying stories critical of PM Modi in the past. Netflix, too, has faced criticism for producing and housing shows like Leila and Sacred Games. Perhaps, the desire to avoid facing similar public anger prompted Disney-owned Star India to take this step.

It is important to look at the implications of this intervention.All the world’s an outrageA moral panic is a situation where the public fear and level of intervention (typically by the state) are disproportionate to the objective threat posed by a person/group/event.In India, one of the most infamous cases of a technology company bowing to moral panic occurred in January 2017. The Narendra Modi government threatened Amazon with the revocation of visas when it became aware that the online retailer’s Canadian website listed doormats that bore the likeness of the Indian flag on them. It was fitting that this threat was issued on Twitter by then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj since the social networking platform was also the place where the anger built-up. It should come as no surprise that Amazon acquiesced, even though it was bound by no law to do so. While such depictions of national symbols are punishable under Indian law, it is debatable whether it should apply to the Canadian website of an American company, not intended for India-based users.

This wasn’t the first instance of sensitivities being enforced extra-territorially on internet companies and certainly won’t be the last. And this is very much a global phenomenon. While the decision by the Chinese state channel CCTV and several other companies to effectively boycott the NBA team Houston Rockets and the censorship of content supporting Hong Kong protests by Blizzard Entertainment garnered worldwide attention, these were only the latest in a long list of companies that have had to apologise to China and ‘correct’ themselves for issues like listing/depicting Taiwan as a separate country or quoting Dalai Lama on social media websites that were not even accessible in the country.

In Saudi Arabia, Netflix had to remove an episode of Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act that was heavily critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the United States as well, content delivery network Cloudflare has twice stopped offering services to websites (Daily Stormer in 2017 and 8Chan in 2019) when faced with heavy criticism because of the nature of the content on them. In both cases, CEO Matthew Prince expressed his dismay at the fact that a service provider had the ability to make this decision.Of Streisand and censorshipThe key difference in the current scenario is that Hotstar appears to have made a proactive intervention. There was no mass outrage or moral panic that it was forced to respond to. By choosing not the make this John Oliver episode available on its platform, it effectively cut out the middlemen and skipped to the censorship step. A move that was ultimately self-defeating since the main segment of the episode is available in India through YouTube anyway and has already garnered more than 60 lakh views while the app was subjected to one-star ratings on Google’s Play Store.The attempt has only drawn more attention to both the episode and the company itself. This is commonly known as the Streisand Effect. Although a more cynical assessment could be that this step has earned Star India some ‘brownie points’ from the Modi government.Earlier this month, The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) announced a new ‘Self-Regulation for Online Curated Content Providers’ with four signatories (Hotstar, Jio, SonyLiv, and Voot). Notably, an earlier version of the code released in February 2019 had additional signatories that chose to opt-out of this version. It was also reported that some of the underlying causes for discontent were lack of transparency, due process, and limited scope of consultations in the lead-up to the new code.Some of the broad changes in the new code include widening the criteria for restricted content from disrespecting national symbols to the sovereignty and integrity of India. It also empowered the body responsible for grievance redressal to impose financial penalties. In addition, signatories of the code and the grievance redressal body are obliged to receive any complaints forwarded/filed by the government.A letter by Internet Freedom Foundation to Justice A.P. Shah cited as concerns, the code’s consideration of the reduction of liability over creativity and the risk of industry capture by large media houses. The pre-emptive action taken in the case of Last Week Tonight’s Modi episode perfectly encapsulates the risks of such a self-regulatory regime. It signals both intents and potentially the establishment of processes to readily restrict content deemed inimical to corporate interests. Such self-censorship, once operationalised, is a slippery slope and can result in much more censorship down the road.The general trend of responding to outrage by falling in line was problematic in itself. But in India’s current context, the eagerness to self-censor is significantly more harmful especially when you consider that other forms of mass media are already beholden to a paternalistic state with severely weakened institutions.The author is a research analyst at The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy. Views are personal.