Internet superpowers

 Political parties in India have taken serious note of posts in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc over abusive contents which were hurtful or defamatory on them. The political parties may not necessarily apply the same yardstick over fair observation of abusive contents in social media. The fact is ruling and opposition political parties are the ones who throw stones at others while living inside glass houses. Their subjective complaints have no relation with being fair on all. In India, political parties function the same way when in opposition as well as in power. However, in principle, the ruling government at the Centre appears to have made up its mind about the need to regulate content on social media. The government argues that unregulated social media promotes misinformation, hate speech, defamation, threats to public order, terrorist incitement, bullying, and anti-national activities. All these appear to be reasonable policy in holding the unregulated and absolutely free social media forum accountable for offences under the law of the land. Recently, Facebook came into media focus for the contents and also for itself playing an interventionist role to favour the ruling party at the Centre. This had led the parliamentary panel on IT headed by Congress leader Sashi Tharoor to question Facebook’s India boss Ajit Mohan for more than two hours. The panel had summoned Facebook after The Wall Street Journal published a story last month saying Ankhi Das, the U.S. tech giant’s Public Policy Director for South and Central Asia, had opposed the taking down of posts by a BJP politician who labelled Indian Muslims traitors. At the hearing lawmakers from opposition parties, including the Congress, slammed Facebook for not taking down hate or inflammatory content posted by users with right-wing ideology or by accounts related to the BJP. Two expert witnesses invited by the committee said Facebook was not as content-neutral as it claimed to be, with “circumstantial evidence” pointing to “collusion” between the social media giant and the BJP government. Facebook’s policy director for India and South and Central Asia, Ankhi Das, posted messages of her support for BJP for several years on an internal group of the company’s employees, detailing efforts to help the party win the 2014 national election, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. In February 2018 India’s antitrust regulator- Competition Commission of India (CCI)-imposed a fine of Rs136 crore on Google Inc. for unfair business practices in the local market for online search. What has been exposed during the past few years merits serious study on how social media giants, who have exploited the unlimited reach of these platforms, bent the rule of every book for profit yet not paying taxes.In July 2020, top CEOs of well known social media giants- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos; Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, were summoned to testify before the US House Antitrust Subcommittee. Governments across the world need to have a closer scrutiny at the social media giants whose invasive and unethical practises have the potential of turning them into super powers of the internet in the next few decades.