Echo chambers have been a defining character of smaller towns for a number of years. When I first went to the U.S. for postgraduate study, I chose a small town in New York state. The university was considered one of the best business schools in the world. The fact that the long since diminished Bausch & Lomb, Eastman Kodak, and Xerox were headquartered in the town meant the university was well-funded. It attracted star faculty despite the town’s small size and reputation for long, cold winters.
When I arrived there, however, I was horrified by the paucity of news. The local Democrat & Chronicle (derisively called the ‘Demagogue and Comical’) only covered news from the local county. There was no U.S. news to speak of, let alone global news. Having grown up on a diet of broadly focused Indian newspapers, this was anathema to me.
My indulgent father gifted me a subscription to the international edition of The Hindu , which was printed weekly and took at least a further week to arrive by post. It was only six pages in a small pamphlet format that could be folded and stuffed into a regular envelope to save on postage costs. Nonetheless, it gave me a much-needed view of international, Indian, and even U.S. news.
Biased ‘news’
In the 1980s, the penultimate decade of U.S. newspaper ascendancy, hundreds of news organisations existed to serve these sorts of towns, much like they still do in multilingual India today. The Internet put paid to all that. One would have thought that democratic access to a large variety of news from all corners of the globe would have opened up the echo chambers in towns and rural areas, but the hard fact is that the Internet has pulled the other way. There are far fewer news outlets now than there were some years ago.
The travesty is that many of these organisations are not news outlets; they are social networks such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter. These have no journalistic norms. Anyone can say anything at any time about any topic with scant respect for the truth. Everything is an opinion, but not clearly labelled as such. As a result, much of the ‘news’ available on these platforms is biased. The unscrupulous sale of personal information and meddling by inimical foreign regimes can potentially even influence the outcome of an election. Worse, the spread of false and malicious news can stoke violence at short notice. We have already seen this in India, when WhatsApp came under Indian regulatory scrutiny after a doctored video that originated as an innocent advertisement in Pakistan spread on that medium and stoked violence.
A stark warning
The ascendance of Jio and the response from its competition means that anywhere between 500 million and 700 million people are now newly online, almost all from towns and rural areas. The U.S.’s experience with the Internet should serve as a stark warning to India. Most Americans now get their news from dubious Internet sources. The hardening of political stances on both sides of the divide is plain to see, and the acute polarisation of the average American’s viewpoint is painful to watch. For India, the danger is that like the U.S., such extreme polarisation can happen in a few short years.
Also, the echo chamber has been greatly enhanced by the highly targeted algorithms that these companies use. The algorithms were built around making users stay online longer and click through to advertisements. They are likely to bombard users with information that serves to reinforce what the algorithm thinks the searcher needs to know. For instance, if I search for a particular type of phone on an e-commerce site even once, future searches are likely to autocomplete that search by showing that phone when I next open the app. It is the same with news. If I show a preference for right-wing leaning posts, for instance, the algorithms are likely to provide me with ever more right-wing posts from people and organisations.
As they familiarise themselves with the Internet, newly online Indians are bound to fall prey to the echo chamber algorithms that social network firms use, as well as other algorithms that ensure that they spend inordinate amounts of time within the bubble of one social network, therefore becoming easy marks for targeted advertising — both for products and of political viewpoints. Much can be said about how we should approach the impending Internet misinformation storm. I shall attempt to make a beginning here.
Things to do
First, we know that tech firms are already under fire from all quarters. Just as they are struggling to meet calls to contain the online spread of misinformation and hate speech online, they are being accused of suppressing both left-wing and right-wing views. There is no pleasing anyone on this issue. Nonetheless, we need to act.
Second, unlike the U.S., which has now become unlikely to directly regulate such firms, India might need to chart its own path by keeping them under check before they proliferate. In the U.S., these issues were not sufficiently legislated for and have existed for over a decade. Existing legislation has been tested by the American court system which has held that companies like Google and Facebook clearly engage in both free speech and press activities when they display content created by third-parties. Free speech is inherent in the Constitution of many other democracies, including India’s. This means that new Indian legislation needs to preserve free speech while still applying pressure to make sure that Internet content is filtered for accuracy, and sometimes, plain decency. Let us remember that our courts do not legislate; they ensure adherence to existing legislation.
The third issue is corporate responsibility. Facebook, for instance, has started to address this matter by publishing ‘transparency reports’ and setting up an ‘oversight board’ to act as a sort of Supreme Court for Facebook’s internal matters. However, for all these companies’ efforts at transparency, we cannot ignore the fact that these numbers reflect judgements that are made behind closed doors. What should be regulatory attempts to influence the transparency of information that members of the public see are instead being converted into secret corporate processes. We have no way of knowing the extent of biases that may be inherent inside each firm. The fact that their main algorithms target advertising and hyper-personalisation of content makes them further suspect as arbiters of balanced news. This means that those who use social media platforms must pull in another direction to maintain access to a range of sources and views. Whether this will be possible as the hinterland of India comes online is doubtful. We need strong intervention now. Else, in addition to the media, which has largely been the responsible fourth estate, we may well witness the creation of an unmanageable fifth estate in the form of Big Tech.
Siddharth Pai is founder of Siana Capital, a venture capital firm focused on Indian Deep Tech and Science
