<nettime> John Harris: Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy? (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Nice key-word: 'hyper-politics' ...


Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/big-tech-whatsapp-democracy-india


Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy?
John Harris, The Guardian, Mon 13 May 2019


Social media such as WhatsApp may enable voters, but encrypted messaging 
polarises them and blocks public scrutiny
In 10 days’ time, two political dramas will reach their denouement, 
thanks to the votes of a combined total of about 1.3 billion people. At 
the heart of both will be a mess of questions about democracy in the 
online age, and how – or even if – we can act to preserve it.
Elections to the European parliament will begin on 23 May, and offer an 
illuminating test of the rightwing populism that has swept across the 
continent. In the UK, they will mark the decisive arrival of Nigel 
Farage’s Brexit party, whose packed rallies are serving notice of a 
politics brimming with bile and rage, masterminded by people with plenty 
of campaigning nous. The same day will see the result of the Indian 
election, a watershed moment for the ruling Hindu nationalist prime 
minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata party, or BJP. 
Whatever the outcomes, both contests will highlight something 
inescapable: that the politics of polarisation, anger and what political 
cliche calls “fake news” is going to be around for a long time to come.
WhatsApp has more than 300 million Indian users, and it is Modi and his 
supporters who have made the most of it
In Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, journalists have been 
shown the alleged wonders of the “war room” where staff are charged with 
monitoring European campaigning – in 24 languages – and somehow 
minimising hate speech and misinformation put around by “bad actors”. 
But this is as nothing compared with what is afoot in the world’s 
largest democracy, and a story centred on WhatsApp, the platform Mark 
Zuckerberg’s company acquired in 2014 for $22bn, whose messages are 
end-to-end encrypted and thus beyond the reach of would-be moderators. 
WhatsApp is thought to have more than 300 million Indian users, and 
though it is central to political campaigning on all sides, it is Modi 
and his supporters who have made the most of it. The political aspects 
of this blur into incidents of murder and violence traced to rumours 
spread via WhatsApp groups – last week, the Financial Times quoted one 
Indian political source claiming that WhatsApp was “the echo chamber of 
all unmitigated lies, fakes and crap in India”.
When I spoke to the UK-based Indian academic Indrajit Roy last week he 
acknowledged India’s “dangerous discourse” but emphasised how the online 
world had given a voice to people who were once outsiders. He talked 
about small, regional parties live-streaming rallies in “remote parts of 
north India”; memes that satirised “how idiotic and self-obsessed [Modi] 
is”; and people using the internet to loudly ask why India’s caste 
hierarchies held them back so much. But then came the flipside. In that 
context, he said, it was perhaps not surprising that Modi was now 
leading “an elite revolt against the kind of advances that have happened 
in the past five or six decades, whether it’s the rights of minorities, 
so-called lower castes, or women”. The fact that he and the BJP are 
using the most modern means of communication to do so is an irony 
evident in the rise of conservatives and nationalists just about 
everywhere.
This, then, is an Indian story, but it chimes with what is happening all 
over the planet. With the help of as many as 900,000 WhatsApp activists, 
the BJP has reportedly collected reams of detailed data about individual 
voters and used it to precisely target messages through innumerable 
WhatsApp groups. A huge and belligerent online community known as the 
Internet Hindus maintains a shrill conversation about the things that 
its members think are standing in the way of their utopia: Muslims, 
“libtards”, secularists. There are highly charged online arguments about 
Indian history, often led by the kind of propagandists who never stand 
for office and thus put themselves beyond any accountability. Thanks to 
the Indian equivalent of birtherism, there are also claims that the 
Nehru-Gandhi family, who still dominate the opposition Congress party, 
have been secret followers of Islam, a claim made with the aid of fake 
family trees and doctored photographs.
Partly because forwarded messages contain no information about their 
original source, it is by no means clear where the division between 
formal party messaging and unauthorised material lies, so Modi and his 
people have complete deniability. They benefit, moreover, from the way 
that the online world seems to ensure that everything is ramped up and 
divided. To quote Subir Sinha, an Indian analyst of society and politics 
based at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies: ”You can’t 
just be a nationalist; you’ve got to be an ultra-nationalist. You can’t 
just be upset by Pakistan’s actions; you’ve got to be outraged.” He 
calls this “hyper-politics”, and says that its international lines of 
communication have led some to some remarkable things. “Tommy Robinson 
is extremely popular among Modi supporters,” he told me. “You will find 
mega-influencers of the Indian right who will approvingly post Tommy 
Robinson material in WhatsApp groups, or on Twitter.”
Yes, the internet is still replete with possibilities of emancipation 
and pluralism, but herein lie the basic features of the global 21st 
century: disagreements that have always been there in politics, both 
democratic and otherwise, now seem to have been rendered unstoppable by 
technology. Significant parts of society are kept in a constant state of 
tension and polarisation, a state exacerbated by the algorithms that 
privilege outrage over nuance, and platforms that threaten to be 
ungovernable. Though the old-fashioned media maintains the pretence that 
electioneering is the preserve of parties, campaigns around elections 
(and referendums) are actually loose and open-ended – often mired in 
hate and division and full of allegations of corruption and betrayal. We 
are seeing the constant hardening-up of political tribes – religious 
communities, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, socialists, cults 
built around supposedly charismatic leaders – with victory going to the 
forces that can most successfully manipulate the online ferment.
Modi is a dab hand at this. So are the forces behind the Brazilian 
president, Jair Bolsonaro. Important Brexiteers are expert in the same 
techniques; as evidenced by his Twitter presidency, the same is true of 
Donald Trump. On the left, too, there are clear manifestations of a 
politics transformed by the way we now communicate – not least in and 
around Corbynism, which represents both sides of the new reality: 
simultaneously the most serious threat to established thinking for 
decades and a long-overdue push against inequality and the lunacies of 
the free market, and also the focus of a shrill, all-or-nothing, 
sometimes truth-bending online discourse.
Whether the platforms at the heart of this new world might eventually 
start to get to grips with the downsides of what they have created is a 
question obscured at present by unconvincing half-measures, and the kind 
of flimsy PR embodied by a recent WhatsApp advertising campaign that 
encouraged its users in India to “Share joy, not rumours”.
The reality of where we are headed was perhaps highlighted only a few 
months ago, when Zuckerberg announced a new vision for Facebook, built 
around the mantra “The future is private”, and a proposal to make his 
most successful invention much more like WhatsApp – an attempt, as some 
people saw it, to start a journey towards Facebook having no 
responsibility for the content of its networks because encryption would 
render everything conveniently impenetrable. In that sense, the Indian 
experience may not be any kind of outlier but a pointer to all our 
futures. If that turns out to be true, what are we going to do about it?
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