Report ยท May 2022
Politics of Disinformation
Why the current approaches are geared to fail and possible path forward
01 · Summary
What the report argues
The report argues that disinformation in India is a political problem, and that the current response of social media platforms, built on removing or fact-checking individual posts, cannot stop it. Drawing on focus group discussions with youth across India and a review of platform content moderation, it finds that platforms amplify content on engagement rather than quality, which spreads misinformation, and frame measures against it as a conflict with free speech. It recommends a transparency law for platforms and a statutory regulator answerable to Parliament rather than the Executive. It asks platforms to choose among a chronological feed, editorial responsibility for what they amplify, or amplifying only credible sources, and to label low-credibility producers, review super users, and scale fact-checking and digital literacy.
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02 · Key findings
Key findings
- Focus group discussions with youth aged 18 to 35 in 25 districts across eight states found that social media platforms have become the dominant source of information for smartphone users, and that many users cannot tell the platform apart from the source of what they read.
- Virtually all the COVID misinformation identified in the discussions could be linked to narratives spread by organised political and business entities, rather than existing in isolation.
- Platforms invest far less in protecting users outside the United States: 87% of Facebook's global budget for classifying misinformation is earmarked for the United States and 13% for the rest of the world, though North American users make up 10% of its daily active users.
- The main driver of pervasive misinformation is value-neutral, engagement-driven amplification, rather than a failure to remove content, yet platforms frame measures against misinformation as being in tension with freedom of expression.
- Content moderation that relies on fact-checking individual posts cannot scale to the volume of content, local context and languages involved, and the report describes the current system as more a public relations exercise than a means of stopping misinformation.
- Disinformation is a bad actor problem: studies cited in the report find that a small subset of sites and handles produce the bulk of misinformation, so action at the level of users and sources would be more effective than post-by-post clean-up.
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