Social Media Governance
How Elon Musk Could Actually Kill Twitter https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/elon-musk-twitter-nightmare-scenarios/671906/ By Charlie Warzel There’s more than one way to sink a social network.
Will Elon Musk-owned Twitter end up as a “deal from hell”? Economist https://www.economist.com/business/2022/10/11/will-elon-musk-owned-twitter-end-up-as-a-deal-from-hell Everything app. Or nothingburger The annals of business have colourful examples of such Stygian mishaps. Sony’s ill-fated acquisition of Columbia Pictures in 1989 occurred when Japan’s bosses thought they were invincible. AOL’s merger with Time Warner, an even bigger mess, was first announced in 2000 at the apogee of dotcom frothiness.
https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/elon-musk-completes-44-billion-deal-to-own-twitter-finally-8234375/ Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has said that he wants to make the social media platform a more freewheeling place for all types of commentary and that he would “reverse the permanent ban” of former President Donald Trump from the service.
Musk’s open approach to speech on Twitter could exacerbate long-simmering issues of toxic content and misinformation, affecting political debates around the world. Early tests will come within days, when Brazil elects its president and American voters go to the polls Nov. 8 for the midterm elections
Musk owns Twitter — and Washington awaits Trump's return https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/27/musk-twitter-washington-trumps-return-00063933 Elon Musk will own Twitter, after the two sides finally closed a $44 billion deal Thursday to sell the company to the world’s richest man...
In an effort seemingly aimed at easing concerns from nervous advertisers, Musk, a self-professed “free-speech absolutist,” promised on Thursday that the platform would not descend into “a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.”
But his first move was to fire four top executives, according to reports Thursday night, including CEO Parag Agrawal and legal chief Vijaya Gadde, the official who guided the company’s policies on harmful speech, and whose team banned Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. ..And he’s hinted at big plans for the platform, saying he wanted to use Twitter to create an “everything app” as well as “a common digital town square where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
Indian Fact-Checker Duo Among Contenders For Nobel Peace: TIME Report October 05, 2022 https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/fact-checkers-mohammed-zubair-pratik-sinha-among-favourites-for-nobel-peace-time-report-3404641
The co-founders of fact-check site AltNews are among 343 candidates in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022.
Excerpt from Time: https://time.com/6219502/nobel-peace-prize-2022-favorites/
Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair
Journalists Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair, co-founders of Indian fact checking website AltNews, have relentlessly been battling misinformation in India, where the Hindu nationalist BJP party has been accused of frequently stoking discrimination against Muslims. Sinha and Zubair have methodologically debunked rumors and fake news circulating on social media and called out hate speech.
The Peace Research Institute Oslo—which researches peaceful relations between states, groups, and people—releases an annual personal shortlist for the Peace Prize. This year, their picks for the prize included some other names and groups, such as Indian activist Harsh Mander, the International Court of Justice, Hong Kong activist Agnes Chow Ting, and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG).
Burnol Moment For BJP https://youtube.com/embed/1E2eCuyQoxM?start=39&end=154
Oct 5, 2022 Burnol Moment For BJP | Mohammad Zubair | Amit Shah
Social Media Curation Does Not Mean Arbitrary Shutting Down Of Accounts : Sanjay Hegde https://www.livelaw.in/interviews/social-media-curation-does-not-mean-arbitrary-shutting-down-of-accounts-sanjay-hegde-full-text-of-interview-203365 LIVELAW NEWS NETWORK 9 July 2022
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G0tqvjOu1Y&t=688s
Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde discusses in this interview with Manu Sebastian, Managing Editor of LiveLaw, issues relating to social media regulation..
if you lock out somebody from Google, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, then a person's access to the public square is denied.
As the public square and the digital public square belong to all users, under the garb of curating, you cannot arbitrarily shut down people. This was the rough outline of what we presented to the Delhi High Court. Curiously, the Government of India came around and said, "no no no we are not necessary parties here, we have nothing to do with this suspension, this is between Mr. Hegde and Twitter and we have nothing to say"....Now substantial hearings have begun and the Government of India took a u-turn around and said no no no twitter can't behave like this. Because, in the meanwhile, quite apart from me, some other accounts also got de-platformed and the Government obviously has had a rethink. .. do think that twitter needs to take a re-look as to which accounts it bans and for that, it should have a logical reason of imminent threat to not only public order but of inducing violence.
.. It may very well also be that Twitter's own organisation back in the larger organisation in the US may have been asking the the local unit as to whether they had crawled when being merely asked to bend. These were Mr. LK Advani's words describing what the press in India did during the emergency...
Sebastian : So there should be a certain regulation of social media to prevent violence and also to prevent hate speech especially in a diverse society like India, but at the same time it has to be ensured that the enforcement does not go into the extent of suppressing dissent or enforcing some sort of social media censorship.
The Facebook Crisis in India Might Be the Worst Facebook Crisis of All By Nitish Pahwa https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-papers-india-modi-misinformation-rss-bjp.html
Oct 26, 2021
Facebook ignored, downplayed, or failed to adequately address harassment, mis- and disinformation, and incitements to violence on its platform in several major countries. ..Yet the most shocking revelations concern the nation that serves as the app’s biggest user base: India, the world’s largest backsliding democracy.
.. the Facebook Papers confirm is not just that the network failed to curb Hindu nationalist hate speech and inadequately directed resources to monitor a nation with 340 million users; it also actively granted impunity to the worst offenders.
the company’s “misinformation classifiers”—automated systems trained on machine learning to detect and take down posts with harmful falsehoods—were not developed enough to recognize and take action on millions of multilanguage disinformation posts that proliferated across Indian feeds.
reports of BJP-linked cells using Facebook and WhatsApp to spread toxic rhetoric and lies surfaced as early as 2016; more such troll operations proliferated in the subsequent years, both within and without election contexts, and led directly to lynchings of religious minorities and riots stirred up by aggrieved Hindus...According to the Wall Street Journal, investigators zoned in on two BJP-linked Hindu nationalist organizations they pinpointed as key drivers of mass Islamophobia, the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, and recommended that the latter be banned. But it didn’t happen, as the company worried that removing the Bajrang Dal would anger Modi. The Journal revealed last year that the then-head of Facebook India, Ankhi Das, opposed applying hate speech rules to Hindu nationalists and BJP politicians.. (Das stepped down by October 2020.)
This year, Modi’s government has cracked down the hardest it ever has on Facebook and other social networks, forcing them to remove posts unfavorable to the BJP, condemning them for spreading content supposedly offensive to fundamentalist Hindus, and threatening to fully expel them if they don’t follow new, restrictive rules drawn up by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology meant to ensure compliance. The message is clear: If Facebook doesn’t follow the BJP’s Hindu nationalist dogma to a T, it can kiss its largest market goodbye.
Social Media: Heralding a New World Order
https://www.epw.in/engage/article/social-media-heralding-new-world-order
With technological advancements, social networking sites eventually became news sharing platforms, which to a large extent is being produced by individuals themselves. This also creates multiple narratives making their role pretty much evident in the flow of information. It, therefore, enables different social actors to influence and build opinions on important issues. This dissemination of information at such a large scale becomes a problem if it is fake or doctored. With so much anonymity, easy access and no watchdogs, this information becomes riskier and all the more problematic because it tends to set narratives that might be one-sided.
Examples: #metoo movement; Govt clamp down/information black out as in Kashmir August 2019; Cambridge analytica; Trump ban in Twitter, 2014 election in India; Masculinity narratives, and violence, cyber violence; Dangerous Speech
Rethinking the Democratic Dilemma Navaneeth M S EPW Vol. 56, Issue No. 22, 29 May, 2021 https://www.epw.in/journal/2021/22/postscript/%E2%80%8Brethinking-democratic-dilemma.html?destination=node/158479
Viewing tech giants like Facebook and Twitter as principal agents of free speech has far-reaching consequences on the health and functioning of a democracy.