There is an ongoing debate as to whether Facebook in India has been deliberately soft on hate-speech posts by the BJP-RSS and sundry Hindutva figures and organisations.
The BJP-RSS deny this, while the Congress and others, triggered by a report in The Wall Street Journal , say the accusation is true. For many of us who are unequivocally against the BJP-RSS’s politics, and who find the ongoing Hindutva heist attempt against our Republic and Constitution unacceptable, this raises a question: if one assumes that Facebook actually has a bias — which many say is clearly observable — then what do we do about our own use of the social media monster?
I’ve seen more than a few posts now asking if people of some convictions should remove themselves altogether from FB. Other friends, in private conversations, have conveyed serious intentions of signing out of Facebook forever.
Preceding this, there was FB-related turbulence after the ceremony for the sthhapana of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya: many friends and acquaintances put up posts declaring they would unfriend anyone celebrating the inauguration of the temple.
While sharing the disgust at the power circus on display in Ayodhya, I have not rushed to cut off the few people on my friends list who I know were exulting in this ‘great victory’ for the ‘mainstream,’ as many of them saw it.
One day soon
The reason for this is simple. I’m convinced that one day, not too far into the future, the gross folly of this whole cruel, cynical exercise in mass manipulation will become painfully obvious to many of those who have been manipulated. When this happens, I don’t want to be blocked off from watching the acrobatic about-turns, the shamefully thin excuses, the ridiculous obfuscations, the puppet-jumps to cleave to some new dispensation that these contacts will be forced to conduct. A lot of these will count on the amnesia of others, the absence of witnesses, so to speak, and I want to make sure I’m able to remind these friends and relatives of mine of what they were proclaiming and cheering at this blackest moment of their moral failure.
Far more important than this projected schadenfreude, I think it is important to be aware that all the votaries of Hindutva can’t be turned into outcasts and ostracised when the wheel of history turns. The Sangh Parivar’s toxic ideology and their project of painting over our society with orange-metallic paint must be resisted with everything we’ve got.
But the riddance of this amoral regime will be meaningless unless we win the next stage of the struggle, which is to bring society and polity afresh to a place where genuine debate, argument and dialogue can flourish. Shutting down, blocking off, dividing, isolating, atomising are acts to which this regime is addicted; when we eventually manage to pull the Republic out of this deep trough, we will have to embrace the opposite tendencies: opening up, communicating, allowing diverse voices saying uncomfortable things to be heard by everyone, participating in forming links and coming together. To do this, we will have to disable the many different unfriend buttons that are hard-wired into us.
Noisy marketplace
Coming to entities such as Facebook, one view is that Mark Zuckerberg tends to favour those he thinks are likely to stay in power, while another argument is that FB is a commercial entity and its algorithms will, unsurprisingly, tend to favour the groups and advertisers who give it the most money. Now, whether either of these theories is true or not, one has to look at what Facebook and indeed social media as a whole provides us.
At the very least FB, Whatsapp, Instagram (all owned by Facebook), and Twitter provide us with channels of instant or rapid communication and platforms for expression. Far from perfect they may be, but they are what we have in today’s reality. There is no reason for critics and opponents of the powers that be to cede ground as far as these channels and platforms are concerned. Particularly as nothing would please the Hindutva troll squads and their paymasters more than to see all or many critical voices forced off the social media road, so to speak.
Imagine a noisy marketplace where there are many arguments and discussions. A lot of these are loud, bordering on brawls, but there are still large areas and corners and pockets, where people communicating uncomfortable truths are able to speak, able to be heard above and below the cacophony of lies and hatred. You can chose to avoid this messy marketplace altogether or regularly visit it and see what you can hear and say. For me, the latter is the obvious choice.
Ruchir Joshi is a filmmaker and columnist.
