By Dolar Popat and Rupa Ganatra-Popat

Until recent years, there had long been a stance by Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Jack Dorsey that Facebook and Twitter were platforms rather than publishers and therefore are not responsible for the content that is published on their platforms.

In the current climate where pandemic conspiracy theories are on the rise and racial injustice is being played out on the world stage, Facebook and Twitters billionaire founders have an increasing responsibility to moderate such content. Both Twitter and Facebook have been removing posts that promote violence, suspending accounts for repetitive hate content like that of Katie Hopkins last week and highlighting manipulated photographs and videos. However even by the time of their action, much of the damage is usually done as was illustrated recently by the racist baby video that President Donald Trump had posted, which had already been viewed over 20 million times on Twitter and over 4 million times on Facebook by the time it was removed.

Since the democratisation of content creation following the launch of social media platforms, each one of us have become content creators creating and publishing our own content, which in turn has created a system where the quality of published content can no longer be controlled. The impact of the last two decades technology revolution is now impacting businesses, political systems, family lives, society and individuals.

The problem has been exasperated and amplified in recent months, perhaps as people have spent an increasing time online during lockdown. From the well-known to the unknown, fake news, misinformation and hate rhetoric are causing harm to many individuals.

Hate speech, disinformation and rumours in India have been responsible for acts of violence and deaths in India for some time. On April 16 this year two sadhus and their driver were lynched in Gadchinchale village in Palghar, Maharashtra. The incident was fuelled by WhatsApp rumours about thieves operating in the area and the group of villagers had mistaken the three passengers as thieves and killed them. Several policemen who intervened were also attacked and injured.

A 2019 Microsoft study found that over 64% of Indians encounter fake news online, the highest reported amongst the 22 countries surveyed. There are a staggering number of edited images, manipulated videos and fake text messages spreading through social media platforms and messaging services like WhatsApp making it harder to distinguish between misinformation and credible facts.

A 2020 University of Michigan study found that Indias misinformation issue has now entered a new troubling era, where misinformation has moved from fake facts that can quickly be disproved to cultural content that play on emotion and identity, which are harder to verify and therefore make it even more likely that people will believe them or act on them.

Fake news on WhatsApp is perhaps the bigger problem to solve given that the app has over 400 million users in India alone and messages are encrypted making it challenging to identify, report and remove content in the same way as it can on other platforms. In 2019, WhatsApp reported that it was deleting 2 million accounts per month as part of an effort to reduce the use of the app to spread fake news and misinformation. In addition to other initiatives that Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp have employed, it is still not enough and there is still much to be done.

The challenge of fake news and hate speech requires careful consideration and collaboration between government, academia, publishers, social media platforms and civil rights groups. In the meantime, we must all contribute to tackling the issue. As individuals, we must ask ourselves whether something we read is true. We must question the articles and videos we are sent. If we see hate posts about violence, we should report it. If we receive forwarded posts on WhatsApp, we must think twice before forwarding these on.

Whilst a long term solution is developed for the problem that has been created as a byproduct of the past decades technology revolution, each one of us has the responsibility to question what we read, post and share. Each one of us should take responsibility for the content we create, the content we consume and the content we forward to others.

Dolar Popat is a UK Member of Parliament. Rupa Ganatra-Popat is an entrepreneur, investor and board adviser

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Read the original here:

There is a pandemic of fake news and hate on social media. You can help fight it - The Times of India Blog