Rajan Laad
The battle commenced in November 2016, Donald Trump had just been elected President, an astounded Washington establishment-media complex was conspiring to undo the election results, but most sinister of them all, Big Tech began exposing their venomous fangs.
They were caught slumbering at the wheel back that had allowed a relatively free exchange of information, a major factor that enabled Trump’s election, they were not going to allow it.
Twitter began with small measures such as shadow banning Trump supporters and suppression of pro-Trump Tweets covertly. In time, Trump supporters were suspended, sometimes permanently banned. YouTube began blocking and demonetizing channels of Trump supporters. But Trump administration and even Trump himself were silent when it should have been one of their top priorities.
Next, Twitter marked a video in President Trump’s tweet as manipulated media. As election season heated up, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram removed a Trump campaign video over copyright complaints. Trump’s Tweets were labelled ‘misleading’.
Anti-Biden news, especially the news of Biden as vice president abusing his power to enable his son Hunter Biden to earn millions of dollars, was censored by Big Tech. It was reported that almost 10% of Biden voters in the key states wouldn’t have voted for him had they known about hunter Biden dealings.
Twitter altered the ‘retweet’ functionality without any notice. Many users presumed that the app had malfunctioned and stopped using the function.
It is entirely possible that all of this and the tyranny of Big Tech caused a Biden victory which was by a slim margin in key states.
After the results of the 2020 elections were out, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram banned President Trump claiming that he was ‘inciting violence’.
Today the big tech function like a de facto super-nation, which operates above the rules of law of any specific country. They work with governments such their influence and networks are deeply embedded in the corridors of power.
If one were to study the pattern of behaviour of big tech in the US and India, there are some interesting parallels.
Regular users, particularly Modi supporters have always complained of being shadowbanned. Some have been suspended for ‘abusive behaviour’. Last year a Tweet by the BJP Spokesperson Sambit Patra was labelled ‘manipulated media’, he complained but they did it again a few months back. They removed Home Minister Amit Shah’s display photo citing copyright reasons.
Recently, Twitter depicted a map of India with Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh as separate countries. IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s Twitter account was blocked briefly, a week after he reprimanded them for its arbitrariness in fighting fake news. There have been instances of opposition leaders tweeting blatant falsehoods, but seldom is punitive action taken.
The instances are myriad and it is amply clear that the direction is identical to that in the US.
Could they really push aggressively to peddle their influence here?
Let’s do a risk assessment and consider the worst possible scenario for the central government.
Perhaps we are months away from the election and the following measures are implemented simultaneously:
- WhatsApp begins by tagging certain messages as ‘False information or hateful and begins restricting the ability to forward or even copy them.
- YouTube bans or suspends certain channels (even TV channels) labelling them as hateful, and other social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter remove videos
- YouTube block the broadcast of political rallies again citing hate again or they do it covertly by slowing down the streaming that causes users to give up.
- Twitter and the others go out of their way to amplify specific stories while they suppress others.
- Google searches are manipulated in such a manner that negative stories show up on the first two pages while the positives are pushed to the third and fourth which people seldom look at
- Social media platforms alter or purposefully suppresses functionality to share certain stories.
