Part 4 : Is Indian Politics Being Converted into a Game on Social Media Platforms like Facebook?

In this, the fourth article in a series, the Congress party’s recent engagement with Facebook is looked into, new information on the activities of Cambridge Analytica’s associates in India is reported and an allegation of possible conflict of interest relating to a senior employee of Facebook in India is examined.

Is Facebook truly a politically agnostic platform? Far from it. Serious doubts have been expressed about how neutral Facebook was in the past and how neutral it will be in the run-up to the April-May 2019 general elections. In the first article in this series of reports, we examined allegations relating to the complicity of Facebook and WhatsApp in disseminating disinformation, hate speech and incendiary information. In the second, we reported how Facebook arrived at the dominant position it is in India at present with more than a little help from the current ruling regime. In the third report in the series, we outlined the role played by key individuals with close links with the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in propagating his party’s right-wing Hindu nationalist agenda on Facebook and other social media platforms. In this, the fourth article in the series, we report on how the Congress party is trying to engage with Facebook, the activities of Cambridge Analytica in India, an allegation of possible conflict of interest relating to a senior employee of Facebook in India.

In the fifth and final article, we will outline the crisis confronting one of the world’s biggest internet conglomerates set up just over a decade ago. We will also reproduce a detailed questionnaire that we sent Facebook and the social media platform’s predicable and somewhat fuzzy responses to 64 pointed questions we raised.

It was in the second week of October that a meeting took place between an influential Congress member of Parliament, a few party functionaries handling social media campaigns and Ankhi Das, Facebook’s senior representative in India. We were told by a reliable source that during the meeting, Das was asked why Facebook had refused permission to the Congress to place paid-for advertisements on its platform that would propagate the opposition party’s claims on, among other issues, the Rafale fighter aircraft deal. Das reportedly said that she was unaware about what had happened and would look into the complaint.

When we sent an email to Divya Spandana, who handles the Congress party’s social media campaigns, to confirm whether our facts were correct or not, she promptly responded by saying the information we had received was “not true at all.” We also asked her if she would like to inform us about when the Congress had started working with Facebook and whether the organisation had conducted workshops and/or provided onsite support to representatives of her party. She did not respond to these queries.

We sent a similar email to the spokesperson of Facebook in New Delhi and received a different kind of response. This is what was stated: “(On the) Congress and advertising, we went back to them on guidelines and clarifications when setting up advertising. Their advertisements ran into scheduling issues for several reasons:  

1. The time limit they set for advertising; they have to seek approvals for content and policies, they ran out of the time for scheduling ads before the approvals came, hence the ad could not run.
2. They have been guided to set enough scheduling time before the ads run.
3. We did a deep dive and they have had several ads run on the platform, so it would be unfair to say that Facebook did not guarantee approvals to run ads.

In 1989, a bill was introduced in the United States Senate to enact the “Honest Ads Act” to promote regulation of political advertising online by companies like Facebook and Google. In the US, media organisations are legally mandated by the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to disclose who has paid how much for political advertisements on television, print publications and on radio channels. However, these requirements do not apply to web platforms. The bill seeks to amend the 1971 law to make digital platforms disclose the source of funds and the names of persons/entities who purchase time and space for political advertisements and also to ensure that “reasonable efforts” are made so that the ads are not purchased “directly or indirectly” by individuals and organisations located in foreign countries.

On 30 October, VICE News in the US reported that the “paid for by” disclosure at the top of each political advertisement on Facebook, ostensibly to bring about greater transparency, could be “easily manipulated.” The media organisation applied to buy fake advertisements on behalf of 100 sitting US Senators and found that all of these were “promptly approved” by Facebook.

Parminder Singh, executive director of IT for Change, a non-government organisation, pointed out that Facebook agreed to abide by the Honest Ads Act even before it was enacted in the US. He asked: “Will it follow similar standards for India?”

The company’s critics have contended that what Facebook has agreed to comply with in the US is a diluted version of what has been proposed in the amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act in order to pre-empt tougher regulations.

In 2015 and 2016, a team of journalists from an internationally-renowned publication based in the US led by an award-winning journalist had started an investigation into the activities of Facebook in India. One of the areas that was sought to be probed was the alleged mismatch in the posts and pages taken down by Facebook in comparison to those taken down after following orders issued by the Indian government’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) in the Ministry (earlier Department) of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY/DEITY) and other ministries and departments. The investigation was never completed and the award-winning journalist moved back from India to the US. Our pointed questions to Facebook on allegations of discrepancies in the data put out by the organisation in comparison to MEITY did not elicit a direct answer.

The most recent transparency report released by Facebook on 16 November shows a consistent increase in the number of government requests for “information” and details of “user accounts,” usually by law-enforcement agencies, over the last five years. Information requests have jumped more than five-fold from 3,245 in the first half of calendar 2013 to 16,580 in the January-June period in 2018. In these periods, the number of requests for details of user accounts have gone up over 5.5 times from 4,144 to 23,047. India is now second after the US in terms of numbers of both types of requests for information.

Between the first halves of 2015 and 2018, while there has been an estimated increase in Facebook accounts in India by 63%, the number of information requests by government agencies has shot up almost three-fold. The increase between January-June 2017 and the corresponding period this year was more than 67%. In 2013, India was on top of the list of countries in terms of requests for content take-down but is, curiously, now down to the seventh position – the lowest thus far since Facebook started compiling and disclosing such data.

Facebook says it complied with the Indian government’s requests roughly half the time. Interestingly, in terms of compliance, India’s position has collapsed, from being in the top 20 (out of 71 countries) to 70th position (out of 127 countries) in 2018. Equally significantly, the number of actual “take-downs” of content that had peaked in 2015 at around 30,000 is now down to below 3,500 – implying that during the period when the proliferation of disinformation is supposed to have peaked in India, Facebook took down problematic content at a slower pace.Predictably the bulk of the content take-down requests from the government have related to religious sentiments, hate speech and, not surprisingly, “anti-state defamation.” 

The reputation of Facebook took a big beating across the world in March 2018 after it was revealed that a political consultancy outfit called Cambridge Analytica – run by a UK-based company named Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) led by Alexander Nix – had illegally hacked into the personal data of over 87 million users of Facebook, most of them located in the US. Of this huge number, only a small proportion – around 5,62,000 – were apparently users based in India.

The most-recent development in this sordid story was published by the UK-based Guardian on 24 November. It reported that the British Parliament had used its legal powers to seize internal documents of Facebook in an “extraordinary” attempt to hold the social media giant to account after Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer questions raised by MPs. The publication claimed that the cache of confidential documents contained “significant revelations” about Facebook’s “decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.” These documents were obtained by invoking a “rare parliamentary mechanism” to compel the founder of an American software company called Six4Three to disclose information. A Facebook spokesperson said this company’s claims had “no merit” and that the disclosure of the documents would violate an order of a court in California, US.

Prabir Purkayastha, who heads the Newsclick portal (which has published this series of articles) and who has been opposing digital monopolies, told us: “What Cambridge Analytica could do when it illegally misused data from users of Facebook to manipulate political preferences, Facebook can theoretically do the same much better, more effectively and more subtly in-house. It can deploy ‘soft’ promotion or demotion of content and pages more effectively internally – and do this deeper, wider and faster.”

Despite the relatively small number of users involved in this country, the Cambridge Analytica scandal led to a big political slanging match in India with leaders of the both the BJP and the Congress accusing each other of having used the services of an associate company of Cambridge Analytica in India, namely, Strategic Communications Laboratories Private Limited. This company had four directors, two from the UK including Nix and two from India, namely, Amrish Kumar Tyagi, and Avneesh Kumar Rai. The company had been active through another associate firm, Ovleno Business Intelligence, headed by Tyagi – who is the son of K C Tyagi, leader of the Janata Dal (United) which is the ruling party in Bihar – together with Himanshu Sharma, who worked on Modi’s “Mission 272” campaign and the BJP’s “missed call” campaign.

There were other firms associated with Tyagi and Rai that have escaped media attention, which we are disclosing here. These companies include the Lucknow-based Stealth Analytics and Business Solutions Private Limited, Routier Operations Consulting Private Limited, Span House Customer Services Private Limited. Among those associated with these firms were graduates of the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow. The names of some of the individuals associated with these corporate entities were Ankur Dahiya, Adwait Vikram Singh, Maddela Giri Kumar. 

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