Reacting swiftly to Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari’s statement calling for investigation by Election Commission to see if any political party had links with disgraced firm Cambridge Analytica, Union minister for Information Technology in Modi government, Ravi Shankar Prasad accused Congress of having links with the concern.
IT minister’s reaction would seem unusual, especially in view of suspicions expressed about BJP’s suspected links with Facebook and its role in emotional manipulation of voters.
Cambridge Analytica (CA) has been in the eye of the storm following an investigation by Britain’s Channel 4 which alleged that the company harvested private data of Facebook users in 2014. It is accused of working with Donald Trump’s election team by harvesting millions of Facebook profiles of US voters and using them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. This is done by identifying people’s emotional vulnerabilities, likes and dislikes and building a campaign around such issues. Emotional manipulation is the key.
CA is now facing a government search of its London office, questions from US state authorities, and a demand by Facebook that it submit to a forensic audit.
IT minister Prasad, alleging that the Congress committed data theft and manipulated data to win elections, questioned the role of CA in the social media management of Congress and party president Rahul Gandhi.
Manish Tewari’s tweet only said the Election Commission “should enquire/recommend (an) investigation (into) what services & to whom they were offering” these services in India.
Congress party’s social media head Divya Spandana refuted Prasad’s charge. “News about Congress engaged/engaging with Cambridge Analytica is absolutely false,” she tweeted.
Spandana further said the BJP is trying to distract from the controversy over the killing of 30 Indian hostages by ISIS in Iraq.
Prasad accused the Congress party of sharing the private data of Indian citizens with CA. “Will the Congress Party now depend upon data manipulation and data theft to win elections?” he asked. “This is not just a question of Congress Party’s association with a rogue data analysis firm but it is a question of free and fair elections in India and democratic values of our country,” he added.
Prasad also said that though he is in favour of social media, however, its misuse will not be tolerated, especially by foreign firms.
The reaction by Modi’s minister may appear abnormally strong and harsh, in view of the fact that reports mention both BJP and Congress links. Further, other reports suggest a deeper link of BJP with outfits playing the game of analysing, influencing and targeting masses for propaganda and political purposes.
Channel 4’s expose of CA mentioning conversations with its Chief Executive Alexander Nix said that they boasted who boasted that they had successfully executed such operations across the world, and mentioned India as one of the countries where they had been active: “In the meetings, the executives boasted that Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) had worked in more than two hundred elections across the world, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.”
Nix claimed they work under stealth in many countries, using front organisations or subcontractors to prevent their presence from being detected.
In India, SCL partners with a company named Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI), which lists BJP, Congress and Janata Dal (United) as its political clients on its website, said a report in The Indian Express, which said OBI is owned by Amrish Tyagi, son of the senior JD(U) leader K C Tyagi.
When contacted by IE, Tyagi said that OBI had not done any social media or digital work in India, instead it had worked with various political parties on the ground. For the BJP it had done booth profiling for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections in 2012. For the same elections, he said his organisation had done an opinion poll for a news channel. For Congress, he said he had done ground surveys for Youth Congress elections in Jharkhand in 2011 and 2012. And for his father’s party, he said he had done ground research in 2010.
An earlier report in the magazine India Legal (IL) with credits to GreatGameIndia, “Did Facebook help Modi create Troll Armies, influence voters in 2014 polls?” delved deeper into BJP links Facebook and its use.
It mentioned a Bloomberg report that revealed how a secret unit of Facebook helped create troll armies for governments around the world including India for digital propaganda to influence elections. The report said Facebook actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition — sometimes with the aid of “troll armies” that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies. The initiative is run by a little-known Facebook global government and politics team led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist.
Importantly, the report mentioned that they worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign as well as 2014 Indian elections.
In India (and many other countries as well) the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers. In the U.S., the unit embedded employees in Trump’s campaign. In India, the company helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader, said the IL report.
India is arguably Facebook’s most important market recently edging out the US as the company’s biggest. The number of users here is growing twice as fast as in the US, and that is not counting the 200 million people who use the company’s WhatsApp messaging service in India, more than anywhere else on the globe.
By the time of India’s 2014 elections, Facebook had for months been working with several campaigns. Modi relied heavily on Facebook and WhatsApp to recruit volunteers who in turn spread his message on social media. Since his election, Modi’s Facebook followers have risen to 43 million, almost twice Trump’s count.
Within weeks of Modi’s election, Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg both visited India as it was rolling out a critical free internet service that was later curbed due to massive protests. Harbath and her team have also travelled to India, offering a series of workshops and sessions that have trained more than 6,000 government officials.
As Modi’s social media reach grew, his followers increasingly turned to Facebook and WhatsApp to target harassment campaigns against his political rivals. India has become a hotbed for fake news, with one hoax story this year that circulated on WhatsApp leading to mob beatings resulting in several deaths. The nation has also become an increasingly dangerous place for opposition parties and reporters.
However, it’s not just Modi or the Bharatiya Janata Party who have utilized Facebook’s services. The company says it offers the same tools and services to all candidates and governments regardless of political affiliation, and even to civil society groups that may have a lesser voice.
While noting the incidents of mob lynching, the IL report said such incidents would not have had such a rapid and massive effect if the youth had not had access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media that allowed the fake news industry to organise and share made-up videos and information.
More importantly, the report said this takes a totally new dimension now that it has been revealed that Facebook & WhatsApp itself colluded with the establishment in creating such “troll armies” for digital propaganda, resulting directly into violence on Indian soil.
The report called for a thorough investigation into Facebook’s interference in India’s elections.
