Editorial: Accountability in the age of social media

We know that Das has a publicly declared political affiliation, but the issue of whether her intervention in a specific case or cases were aligned to Facebook policies is something that the social media giant needs to determine. Just as importantly, it is for the Joint Parliamentary Committee to determine whether there was a bias in defining what constitutes hate speech and whether this slant was a result of the fear of the government.

At the heart of this controversy, however, lies a larger existential problem. What are social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter? Are they merely neutral platforms, on which content is posted by others? Or are they publishers, who need to assume a full responsibility, as for example newspapers do, for what they publish? These questions are complex and the answers are anything but simple. What we do know is that social media giants have for long shrugged off responsibility for the content because they were merely platforms, whenever it suits them. At the same time, in response to the explosion of depravity and vileness on these platforms, both Facebook and Twitter have tried to set up mechanisms to identify and remove hateful content. Of course, such interventions, given the sheer numbers of subscribers, are driven by algorithms and are far from perfect. Also, it is difficult, if not well-nigh impossible, to pre-censor content in a space that has immediacy at the very heart of its appeal.

While acknowledging the difference between a social media platform and a traditional publisher, it is important to understand that the term ‘neutral platform’ needs to be carefully parsed. At one level, such social media platforms are anything but neutral. Their algorithms are written in a manner to influence – though ostensibly based on the consumer’s preferences – what people see, hear, and know all over the world. In response to the growing criticism that Facebook peddled fake news and hate news, the company launched a news tab last year – curated and vetted by professional journalists. Such moves may help but have also furthered the view that when it chooses to, Facebook is quite willing to play publisher and be more than a platform.

The other big issue of course is that at the end of the day, Facebook is a media company. India, for instance, is hugely important, being its biggest subscriber market. It would be naive to believe that Facebook is impervious to how the Modi government regards it – which was at the core of the India controversy. Facebook was launched 17 years ago and Twitter a couple of years later. As their valuation and power have grown, so have the questions about their domination of the mind space and their impact on free speech. Any kind of regulation to purge these platforms of hate speech and bias will depend on a mix of initiatives – ranging from the technological (improved ways to identify and shut down such speech), the internal (enforcing strict company guidelines in determining and dealing with hatred and slant), and the legal (a regulatory system that allows such social media platforms to function freely but with checks and balances). Clearly, we haven’t got there yet.