Facebook Banned 702 Pages For Spreading Propaganda, But Will It Make Any Impact This Election?

Yesterday, Facebook put out a blog saying it had removed 702 pages and accounts from its platform that violated its policies on "coordinated inauthentic behavior".

What that means is that the social media company blocked pages spreading propaganda for Indian political parties.

Reuters

Of the takedowns, 687 were linked to the Congress party IT cell, and 15 were tied to a local IT firm Silver Touch. However, while it looks like the Congress party is the only one playing dirty here, there's more than you can see at first glance

For one thing, Silver Touch wasn't furthering its own gains, it was solely posting messages in favour of the BJP. The IT firm has also been in the past involved with the development of the official NaMo app, as well as a few other government projects. And indeed, it seems their 15 takedowns might be the most damaging.

All told, the 687 pages and accounts linked to the INC that were banned had about 2.06 lakh followers. The smaller list seeming to be linked to the BJP however had about 26 lakh followers.

The Digital Forensic Research Lab, which partnered with Facebook for the page review, didn't have great things to say about either party, according to Reuters. They said accounts linked to Congress tended to post satire about the ruling government, while pro-BJP pages "carried vitriolic posts against opposition leaders".

"The fact that partisans on both sides resorted to such tactics is a troubling feature," the DRF said.

Importantly though, as Facebook's head of cybersecurity police Nathaniel Gleicher said, none of these pages or accounts were taken down because of their content. Facebook hasn't specified, so there may well have been some nasty stuff posted on these pages. However, the social network's action was triggered by how these actors were operating. That means if they were using fake accounts, misleading people, or pretending to not be backing their agenda behind the posts, they were on the chopping block.

Their reasoning for this is clear. Facebook doesn't want to be caught in another Cambridge Analytica. That scandal singlehandedly almost took down the whole network, showing how the social network betrayed its user's privacy and forcing CEO Mark Zuckerberg to say sorry to the world.

Impact on Indian election?

But how does this affect our elections coming up? Well, probably not one bit. You see it's up to the Election Commission to police violations, but a full day after Facebook's announcement there's been no talk of censure against the parties involved. And the lakhs of followers that previously subscribed to these pages aren't going to read the news and see this as a takedown of misleading pages. They're instead going to look at it as an attack on their political party of choice, they're going to interpret it as Facebook being biased one way or the other.

Reuters

And all of this is happening just days before voting begins on April 11. At this point, cleaning house serves no real purpose. If Facebook was truly committed to not having its platform used to manipulate a voting populace, they would have conducted this survey months, or at least weeks ago. Removing the propaganda echo chamber 10 days before we head to the polls is merely lip service from a giant that's realised it can be given detention, and doesn't want to piss off the teacher.

It's not like this is a surprise either. We've known for years that this would be an election year because that's how the system is set up. And we've known for at least a year how Russia allegedly abused Facebook's data and systems to spread Trump propaganda and influence the 2016 US elections. Yet, by all accounts, the Election Commission is struggling to control the fake news spreading pre-elections because it wasn't prepared.

And that's just Facebook. We have no idea what the situation is on WhatsApp because that's a platform impossible to monitor in this fashion. As of last month, companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp and others submitted to the EC's voluntary code of conduct, promising to take down any deliberately misleading information within three hours. Aside from that however, there's no active measure in place.

Reuters

"The mechanism they have set up is that if they see any fake news, they will request the Internet and Mobile Association of India to contact Facebook or YouTube and ask them to take it down," Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, told the Washington Post. "The Association then requests the platforms to do this. This is ludicrously slow."

Ultimately, as a reader, it's in your best interest to be exposed to as many trusted news sources as possible, as many avenues of information as possible, and not be spurred into action at the polls based on propaganda from some deep-rooted online echo chamber.