Nice key-word: 'hyper-politics' ...
Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/big-tech-whatsapp-democracy-india
Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy?
John Harris, The Guardian, Mon 13 May 2019
Social media such as WhatsApp may enable voters, but encrypted messaging
polarises them and blocks public scrutiny
In 10 days’ time, two political dramas will reach their denouement,
thanks to the votes of a combined total of about 1.3 billion people. At
the heart of both will be a mess of questions about democracy in the
online age, and how – or even if – we can act to preserve it.
Elections to the European parliament will begin on 23 May, and offer an
illuminating test of the rightwing populism that has swept across the
continent. In the UK, they will mark the decisive arrival of Nigel
Farage’s Brexit party, whose packed rallies are serving notice of a
politics brimming with bile and rage, masterminded by people with plenty
of campaigning nous. The same day will see the result of the Indian
election, a watershed moment for the ruling Hindu nationalist prime
minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata party, or BJP.
Whatever the outcomes, both contests will highlight something
inescapable: that the politics of polarisation, anger and what political
cliche calls “fake news” is going to be around for a long time to come.
WhatsApp has more than 300 million Indian users, and it is Modi and his
supporters who have made the most of it
In Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, journalists have been
shown the alleged wonders of the “war room” where staff are charged with
monitoring European campaigning – in 24 languages – and somehow
minimising hate speech and misinformation put around by “bad actors”.
But this is as nothing compared with what is afoot in the world’s
largest democracy, and a story centred on WhatsApp, the platform Mark
Zuckerberg’s company acquired in 2014 for $22bn, whose messages are
end-to-end encrypted and thus beyond the reach of would-be moderators.
WhatsApp is thought to have more than 300 million Indian users, and
though it is central to political campaigning on all sides, it is Modi
and his supporters who have made the most of it. The political aspects
of this blur into incidents of murder and violence traced to rumours
spread via WhatsApp groups – last week, the Financial Times quoted one
Indian political source claiming that WhatsApp was “the echo chamber of
all unmitigated lies, fakes and crap in India”.
When I spoke to the UK-based Indian academic Indrajit Roy last week he
acknowledged India’s “dangerous discourse” but emphasised how the online
world had given a voice to people who were once outsiders. He talked
about small, regional parties live-streaming rallies in “remote parts of
north India”; memes that satirised “how idiotic and self-obsessed [Modi]
is”; and people using the internet to loudly ask why India’s caste
hierarchies held them back so much. But then came the flipside. In that
context, he said, it was perhaps not surprising that Modi was now
leading “an elite revolt against the kind of advances that have happened
in the past five or six decades, whether it’s the rights of minorities,
so-called lower castes, or women”. The fact that he and the BJP are
using the most modern means of communication to do so is an irony
evident in the rise of conservatives and nationalists just about
everywhere.
This, then, is an Indian story, but it chimes with what is happening all
over the planet. With the help of as many as 900,000 WhatsApp activists,
the BJP has reportedly collected reams of detailed data about individual
voters and used it to precisely target messages through innumerable
WhatsApp groups. A huge and belligerent online community known as the
Internet Hindus maintains a shrill conversation about the things that
its members think are standing in the way of their utopia: Muslims,
“libtards”, secularists. There are highly charged online arguments about
Indian history, often led by the kind of propagandists who never stand
for office and thus put themselves beyond any accountability. Thanks to
the Indian equivalent of birtherism, there are also claims that the
Nehru-Gandhi family, who still dominate the opposition Congress party,
have been secret followers of Islam, a claim made with the aid of fake
family trees and doctored photographs.
Partly because forwarded messages contain no information about their
original source, it is by no means clear where the division between
formal party messaging and unauthorised material lies, so Modi and his
people have complete deniability. They benefit, moreover, from the way
that the online world seems to ensure that everything is ramped up and
divided. To quote Subir Sinha, an Indian analyst of society and politics
based at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies: ”You can’t
just be a nationalist; you’ve got to be an ultra-nationalist. You can’t
just be upset by Pakistan’s actions; you’ve got to be outraged.” He
calls this “hyper-politics”, and says that its international lines of
communication have led some to some remarkable things. “Tommy Robinson
is extremely popular among Modi supporters,” he told me. “You will find
mega-influencers of the Indian right who will approvingly post Tommy
Robinson material in WhatsApp groups, or on Twitter.”
Yes, the internet is still replete with possibilities of emancipation
and pluralism, but herein lie the basic features of the global 21st
century: disagreements that have always been there in politics, both
democratic and otherwise, now seem to have been rendered unstoppable by
technology. Significant parts of society are kept in a constant state of
tension and polarisation, a state exacerbated by the algorithms that
privilege outrage over nuance, and platforms that threaten to be
ungovernable. Though the old-fashioned media maintains the pretence that
electioneering is the preserve of parties, campaigns around elections
(and referendums) are actually loose and open-ended – often mired in
hate and division and full of allegations of corruption and betrayal. We
are seeing the constant hardening-up of political tribes – religious
communities, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, socialists, cults
built around supposedly charismatic leaders – with victory going to the
forces that can most successfully manipulate the online ferment.
Modi is a dab hand at this. So are the forces behind the Brazilian
president, Jair Bolsonaro. Important Brexiteers are expert in the same
techniques; as evidenced by his Twitter presidency, the same is true of
Donald Trump. On the left, too, there are clear manifestations of a
politics transformed by the way we now communicate – not least in and
around Corbynism, which represents both sides of the new reality:
simultaneously the most serious threat to established thinking for
decades and a long-overdue push against inequality and the lunacies of
the free market, and also the focus of a shrill, all-or-nothing,
sometimes truth-bending online discourse.
Whether the platforms at the heart of this new world might eventually
start to get to grips with the downsides of what they have created is a
question obscured at present by unconvincing half-measures, and the kind
of flimsy PR embodied by a recent WhatsApp advertising campaign that
encouraged its users in India to “Share joy, not rumours”.
The reality of where we are headed was perhaps highlighted only a few
months ago, when Zuckerberg announced a new vision for Facebook, built
around the mantra “The future is private”, and a proposal to make his
most successful invention much more like WhatsApp – an attempt, as some
people saw it, to start a journey towards Facebook having no
responsibility for the content of its networks because encryption would
render everything conveniently impenetrable. In that sense, the Indian
experience may not be any kind of outlier but a pointer to all our
futures. If that turns out to be true, what are we going to do about it?
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