Meta denies empowering Modi government, but doesn’t shake misinformation fears

We’ve had a couple more data points over the past week demonstrating the dangers to democracy posed by the seemingly tight interplay between the world’s rising authoritarian leaders, social media and the billionaire oligarchs who seek to control it.

A US-centred global media means the lion’s share of headlines have been about the “did-he/didn’t-he” debate over whether billionaire (and likely soon-to-be Twitter owner) Elon Musk spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin about a Ukraine peace deal — Musk’s insistence on continually tripling-down have encouraged the “yes, yes he did” camp.

But it was news out of India that reminded us of the true power social media gives misinformation, after reports Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seemingly has a hotline to Meta (formerly Facebook), enabling the government to force take-downs of critical posts on the company’s platforms.

One of India’s leading news outlets The Wire reported a significant new power given to India’s political elite under Meta’s controversial program, XCheck (pronounced “cross-check”). The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz exposed the program a year ago in his Facebook papers reporting based on whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Now, reports The Wire, it seems that the head of the BJP’s notorious IT cell, Amit Malviya, was able to use XCheck privileges to have material from pages critical of the government taken down from Meta’s platforms without review. 

The take-downs involved Instagram posts from the anonymous satirical account @cringearchivist, allegedly flagged for sexual activity and nudity, of which the posts had neither. The Wire reports it had received internal documents that showed the posts had been reported by a user with XCheck privileges, which meant the decision to remove the posts was not subject to review.

Meta, which had only admitted that XCheck even existed after The Wall Street Journal’s report last year, cried “fake news”, claiming the documents were fabricated and that XCheck only allowed certain users to be exempt from the company’s usual moderation process.

But the WSJ suggests that number is 5.8 million users worldwide as of 2020. The paper reported that XCheck “shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process”, and that “some users are ‘whitelisted’ — rendered immune from enforcement actions — while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come”.

“At times, the documents show, XCheck has protected public figures whose posts contain harassment or incitement to violence, violations that would typically lead to sanctions for regular users.”

At the time Facebook (as the company was then still known) said it was phasing out “whitelisting”. The Wire says that until now there were no reports of XCheck users in South Asia. This week, in response to The Wire’s reporting, Meta confirmed that the XCheck program continued. The company did not deny that Malviya was on the list, but insisted that the program did not give users the privilege of ordering take-downs of others’ material. 

The company’s head of security, Guy Rosen, tweeted that XCheck was “built to prevent potential over-enforcement mistakes. It has nothing to do with the ability to report posts, as alleged in the article.”

Since the initial article (and a follow-up of a subsequent internal email), Meta has maintained the faked-documents angle. The Wire has stood by its reporting, and opened up its processes to review. Social media has lit up with the pros and cons. (Disclosure: count me a long-time fan of the journalism of The Wire — I’ve known and respected the journal’s founder and co-author of this month’s Meta stories Siddharth Varadarajan for nearly 20 years.)

Whether the story ends up as another example of Meta’s wrongdoing or of a media taken in by dirty tricks, the online discussion has obscured the more important debate about how fake news spreads across social media in India, and how it entrenches the increasingly authoritarian BJP government. 

In 2020, The Wire reported on revelations from fact-checking site AltNews detailing Malviya’s role in generating misinformation, noting that much of it continues to circulate on social media platforms. A significant portion of this happens out of sight of public pages on the messaging platform WhatsApp.

India has become a key market for Meta. It’s a marriage of convenience that saw early connections between Modi and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Modi’s first big US visit in 2015 included a public sit-down between the two at the company’s Silicon Valley campus. (Zuckerberg introduced Modi to his parents.) 

In early 2017, before the Cambridge Analytica scandal about political misuse of Facebook’s platforms blew up, Zuckerberg praised Modi’s style of using Facebook to connect his government and the community, saying the “platform can help establish direct dialogue and accountability between people and our elected leaders”. 

Hmm, yes. That’s turned out to be the problem.