Navigating Online threats
Embedded in the Digiverse: Negotiating the Swamps, Mudflats and Blue Rivers of New Media
The Internet is a shape-shifting beast, not easy to get a hold of. One tries to scoop up the water in one’s palm but it slips through the fingers.
By Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Ask a middle-aged adult about their school or college years— chances are they will say, “I grew up in simpler times.” Put this question to someone who is a teenager or a pre-teen today, say thirty years from now, and they will most likely give the same answer. This holds true of media in the digital age. What appears to be a dense jungle now, will, tomorrow, look like a rosy garden path. The world eases up every twenty-four hours, and yet, it gets more complex as time goes on.
Not since the invention of the printing press and television, have we been forced to reckon with so much change, especially the manner in which we consume news. The Internet is a shape-shifting beast, not easy to get a hold of. One tries to scoop up the water in one’s palm but it slips through the fingers.
Media now means all kinds of things. Even messaging apps are part of what’s called New Media. Governments have been known to deploy spyware like Pegasus to snoop on dissidents, and remotely plant ‘evidence’ on laptops and phones, which is then used to implicate them in fabricated cases. It often begins with an innocuous message on an instant messaging service or an email.
At times, the snooping is harmless but annoying. It’s the Google algorithm – an abstract god-like figure – doing its thing. Ever since Goethe-Institut commissioned me to write an article, my Instagram and Facebook feeds prominently feature advertisements from Goethe-Institut and Max Mueller Bhavan: “Learn German Online. Language skills are a valuable asset for studies and work!” One might lead a reclusive life, but the phone is always listening!
Between the extreme poles of good and evil, there lies an ambivalent expanse of grey. The news consumer today is vulnerable to manipulation in ways that that could never be imagined. New words like ‘clickbait’, ‘doomscrolling’ and ‘echo chamber’ have entered the vocabulary of the digitally literate, who form a small minority of users. What about the rest? Someone like my mother, who is eighty, finds it hard to sift through the reams of notifications that seem to appear magically, and interminably, on her smartphone. There is an element of helplessness. Your average news consumer is rowing a small boat in a vast ocean, constantly buffeted by strong winds from all directions, and mysterious currents underneath.
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Negotiating the Attention Economy
We inhabit what’s called the attention economy. There are professionals actively involved in manufacturing this attention economy, vying for as much of our eyeballs and time as is possible. We are familiar with certain click-bait headline patterns, for instance, “23 Things Parents Should Never Apologize For”, or “This Baby Panda Showed up at my Door. You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” Headlines that appeal to a sense of tribal belonging also tend to drive increased engagement, the ultimate goal of news and social media sites. As former Google strategist turned Oxford scholar, James Williams, writes in his book, Stand Out of Our Light:
In the attention economy, this is the game all persuasive design must play – not only the writers of headlines. In fact, there’s a burgeoning industry of authors and consultants helping designers of all sorts draw on the latest research in behavioural science to punch the right buttons in our brains as effectively and reliably as possible...One major aim of such persuasive design is to keep users coming back to a product repeatedly, which requires the creation of habits.
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Political Impact of New Media
Until now, I have been talking about the social implications of New Media, and what it means to the individual. It can also have far-reaching political impact. We saw this during the 2010-11 Arab Spring uprisings and protests in the Middle East and North Africa. A piece on the Pew Research Centre website - ‘The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings’ – underlines this phenomenon:
Social media indeed played a part in the Arab uprisings. Networks formed online were crucial in organizing a core group of activists, specifically in Egypt. Civil society leaders in Arab countries emphasized the role of the internet, mobile phones, and social media in the protests.
A March 2023 press release on the UN OHCR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) website cites UN experts as saying:
Since the coup, pro-junta actors have taken advantage of Telegram's lax approach to content moderation and gaps in its terms of service… They have attracted tens of thousands of followers by posting violent and misogynistic content… Gendered abuse has caused many women to cut back their online activism and retreat from public life.
Swati Chaturvedi is an Indian journalist, and the author of I Am a Troll (Juggernaut Books). A vocal critic of government policy, she knows a thing or two about doxxing:
Each day I would wake up to hundreds of notifications discussing my ‘rate’ and fictitious trysts where I ‘the nymphomaniac could not get enough and was begging for more.’ Yes, that was me being described on a public medium for posterity, my twenty-year-old professional career – which I take huge pride in – reduced to slander. There was a base quality to these attacks, a hateful sexism that I had never encountered in all these years of being a reporter. My mornings were filled with rage and a sick, slightly nauseous feeling. The attacks were personal and after six months I’d had enough. My criminal complaint was the first of its kind filed by an Indian journalist.
Besides, it can also be used by foreign players to exacerbate existing societal faultlines and influence election results in other countries, as we have seen in the case of some Western democracies. The capacity for mischief is as limitless as the internet.
In times when events move rapidly, like during the Delhi riots of 2020 or the second Covid wave in India, when thousands lost their lives, the credibility of information is difficult to verify. Every forwarded message on WhatsApp is not the bearer of truth. The temptation for the government in such circumstances is to shut the Internet down, like it did in Manipur and Kashmir.
India shuts down its Internet more frequently than any other democracy in the world. In August this year, TIME magazine wrote, “India has ranked first in the world for shutting off the internet over the past five years, according to SFLC.in and other digital rights watchdogs. In the first six months of this year, it imposed almost as many shutdowns as it did in all of 2022, according to Surfshark, a Netherlands-based virtual private network (VPN) provider.” In June 2023, Forbes reported that India was responsible for 84 of a global 187 Internet shutdowns in 2022 alone.” This measure can backfire and lead to spread of disinformation and rumours, aside from crippling the life and livelihood of citizens, and loss to the exchequer in an era when so much economic activity is online.
So, what are the tools for media engagement that we have at our disposal today – tools that help the citizen separate information from disinformation, fact from fiction. In India, sites like Alt News started the culture of fact-checking fake news and putting it out in the public domain. Thus began a trend—nowadays all mainstream news portals, both Left and Right, carry out their own fact-checks of viral stories. The problem here is that even fact-checks are coloured by ideology, since the fact itself is no longer something that is objective and immutable. We then slip into what Bernard Williams called ‘vulgar relativism’.
It’s simply not possible to police what an individual says at all times, as is evident in the case of Donald Trump. Under fire from the American administration, X (formerly Twitter) tried to shackle Trump, but he countered it by launching Truth Social, his own branded social media. An individual, given the means, can transcend the norms not only of legacy media but also New Media. This also raises the question of what the citizen wants: Does he even have a desire to, at the very least, approximate the truth, or does he choose to listen to only what he wants to listen to.
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Escaping the Echo Chamber
But all is not doomed. Let me conclude on a note of optimism and humour.
Tony Faddel joined Apple Inc. in 2001 and oversaw iPod hardware, software, and accessories development. He is known as the ‘father of the iPod’. Then, he quit. In 2017 he said something revealing:
I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world? Did we really bring a nuclear bomb with information that can – like we see with fake news – blow up people’s brains and reprogram them? Or did we bring light to people who never had information, who can now be empowered?
Fast broadband changed all that. Now I consume news digitally via aggregating apps like Haystack. For any world event, I can hop from one channel to another – ABC, CBS, Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC, Euronews, Fox, News Nation, DW – then make up my mind. We also have access to the world’s print media, and communities on social media for music, books, pretty much any eccentric pursuit. It makes us less lonely.
These days I follow the supermarket approach to news; it’s sometimes necessary to not to get stuck with the same old supermarket in one’s neighbourhood. At least the ones in other neighbourhoods, cities and countries are different. The shelves here stock a variety of products. What we have today is choice; it is up to each of us how we use it. Instead of succumbing to what’s called ‘option paralysis’, we can use choice to empower and enrich ourselves.
If I speak purely as a viewer and not as a journalist, the supermarket approach is rewarding in another way. It enables me to escape the echo chamber of my country and dive into the news ecosystem of another one. The American news train runs on its own set of rail tracks: cyclones, gun violence, runaway pet pigs and human interest stories like, “Man Meets Pilot in his Baby Photo Who Inspired His Career”. It gives me a break from the repetitious cycle of Indian news. Sometimes I end up watching channels broadcasting from small American towns. When one learns something about a part of the world far away from us, one learns something about oneself. Distances separate us but deep inside all humans reside in the same village. Just the flora and fauna are different.
A funny observation to end with. Recently a video of the Indian prime minister went viral on social media. In the widely circulated clip, he can be seen playing garba (a traditional Gujarati dance) with a group of women. The PM cautioned the country about the dangers posed by deep fake images and videos generated using Artificial Intelligence. “The reality is that I have not played the garba since I left school, I have been a victim of a deep-fake video,” he told journalists in Delhi.
This shows us that there is something beyond the paranoia about AI and algorithms – life itself, which is capable of unwitting surprises. In that, lies our redemption as the human race. In humour, lies hope.