Is Facebook’s crackdown on bogus pages in India a mere PR gimmick
On Monday, Facebook announced that they removed 687 pages linked to individuals connected to the Indian National Congress and 15 pages linked to an IT Firm, Silver Touch. The move comes at a time when the Menlo Park-headquartered company has been caught egg-faced on more occasions than most companies would be able to survive.
Right since the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, the company has been caught in an embarrassing position after an embarrassing position. Right from the Cambridge Analytica scandal where so-called researchers were able to get private information about individuals without permission and then use the data to target political ads one way or another in order to swing an election to the mass murder and genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, Facebook has been at the centre of it all. Despite its best efforts, the company hasn’t been able to get out of the loop in the past 2 years. Each scandalous discovery has been followed by an apology, followed by some policy change, followed by yet another scandalous discovery. Most recently, the company founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced their biggest pivot yet — a move to shift Facebook from public sharing to private and ephemeral messaging within smaller groups. Not long after this announcement came to the next scandal — about 20,000 Facebook employees have had access to the passwords of anywhere between 200 million and 600 million individuals since at least 2012. This is certainly not the kind of publicity the company wanted in the wake of its move to enable more privacy amongst its users.
What does all this have to do with the deletion of pages and groups linked to the Indian National Congress and an IT company? Well, it could be nothing. Or everything.
The case that deleting pages has nothing to do with Facebook’s recent controversies
Amongst the biggest problems faced by social media platforms today is misinformation campaigns by vested interests that thrive on these platforms. When an election is just around the corner, those vested interests are the political parties vying for power. It is in Facebook’s interest to ensure that the information spread on its platforms — including Instagram and Whatsapp — is factual, non-incendiary, and relevant to the interests of its users. When users find useful information on the platform, they trust the platform more.
Taking these pages down helps Facebook gain user trust. Misleading pages erode user trust. Nothing more to read into their actions.
A twist in the tale
As soon as the move was announced, people sympathetic to the Bharatiya Janata Party were quick to pounce on the fact that the Indian National Congress was caught red-handed. However, upon closer examination, we realise that Silver Touch is actually a company closely linked to the ruling BJP government. It has developed apps for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the office of the President of India. Not just that, one of the pages managed by Silver Touch, The Indian Eye, had a following of 2.6 million as compared with just 206 k on the Congress leaning pages. The pages managed by Silver Eye also outspent the ones affiliated with the Congress on ads run on Facebook as well, spending 79,000 USD versus 39,000 USD spent by the latter. With this information, it seems as though Facebook has taken action against both leading parties in India.
https://twitter.com/free_thinker/status/1112692339116392448
The case that deleting these pages has everything to do with Facebook’s recent controversies.
Facebook has, rightly, faced flack for its handling of misinformation campaigns run during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. The company looked the other way even as foreign entities and vested interests misused their platform. The Lok Sabha Elections of 2019 are the biggest test for Facebook since 2016. Another misstep will confirm that the company has not learnt anything in the intervening years. In this light, the platform needs to not only take the steps to make political messaging free of hate and misinformation in the world’s largest democracy, but it also needs to be seen to be taking strong action.
As much as it would like to gain from the large ad dollars these pages would have inevitably spent on the platform — surrogate pages are the best way for political parties to spend money without the watchful gaze of the Election Commission — Facebook sees its long term survival more important at the moment. Even if it comes at the cost of a few hundred thousand dollars.
The international media will be keeping a close watch on elections in India and a certificate of their approval will go a long way in mending Facebook’s reputation in the eyes of regulators, users, and politicians world over.
Is it enough?
Time and again, Facebook has found itself in the same cycle of the following controversy with corrective action, followed by further controversy. While these are steps in the right direction, it would be presumptuous to underestimate the power of jugaad in Indian elections. One can expect the same parties to learn from these developments and alter strategies to keep their messaging going despite this setback. How Facebook responds to these follow-up actions will tell us whether this was a mere PR exercise or something the company is serious about tackling head-on.
