Law in the Internet Society

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Hegemony on the Internet and How Majoritarianism Can Exacerbate It

A Bloomberg article narrates a story of Anasuya Sengupta, an Indian activist, who wanted to create a Wikipedia page for a prominent British-Nigerian human-rights activist, Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi. Adeleye-Fayemi is well-known in activist circles for having helped in ending the Liberian Civil War. But she did not exist on Wikipedia, “which meant that as far as many people were concerned, she didn’t exist at all.” Sengupta decided to write a Wikipedia page on Adeleye-Fayemi. She cited several articles from the Nigerian press and clicked “publish.” But a few minutes later, a Wikipedia editor deleted her entry on grounds that the entry was trifling. Sengupta eventually convinced Wikipedia editors to include the entry, but only after a former chair of the Wikimedia foundation—who happened to be sitting next to her at a conference—intervened on her behalf.

This isn’t a one-off incident. North Americans and Europeans make up for less than a quarter of the population on the internet, but control most of its information. For example, most content on the internet relating to Africa is written by North-American and European men. Thenmozhi Soundarajan, a prominent Dalit activist based out of New York—who is engaged in publishing Dalit history on Wikipedia—talks about having to use a white male username on Wikipedia to have more articles approved. This is the western hegemony of the internet where white men act as gatekeepers of online knowledge. As Thenmozi puts it, this hegemonic gatekeeping is an impediment “to reclaim[ing] the agency of a mass of people who have historically remained peripheral in the consciousness of the academia and the state, and to bring forth their stories of resistance, resilience, and heroism. In the words of Woodson, ‘If a race has no history, if it has no worth-while tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.’” Thenmozhi’s organization Equality Labs is one of many online groups led by women of color from marginalized communities across the world which challenge this hegemony by sharing their knowledge and histories with the online community. But in India, they face another form of hegemony. One more violent and well organized: this is the Indian right wing.

The Indian right wing is organized, tech savvy, and determined to maintain its hegemonic control over South-Asian society. With over 560 million users—not including the number of Indians living abroad—India is the second largest online market in the world. In the run up to India’s 2014 general election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—then the primary opposition party—and its leader Narendra Modi saw India’s internet penetration as a propaganda opportunity. They created an army of online volunteers who used social media to change Indian’s perception of Modi from being a political pariah—responsible for a genocide in his home state of Gujarat—to being a shrewd technocrat and a messiah in the waiting. This social-media strategy helped the BJP win with a landslide. What began as an election strategy has grown “into a sophisticated machine that includes a huge ‘troll army’ of paid and voluntary supporters who help spread the party’s message on platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, instantly reaching millions of people.” This troll army has normalized bigotry and hate towards minorities and Dalits. It has weaponized social media websites to spread disinformation and hate.

In early 2020, Facebook’s employees in-charge of policing hate speech began to get concerned with Facebook posts of an Indian politician named T. Raja Singh who had called for Rohingya refugees to be shot, called Muslisms traitors, and threatened to raze mosques. This clearly violated Facebook’s claimed community standards. In fact, Facebook has taken down numerous white supremacist pages on the grounds that their posts could lead to violence in the real world. No one had any doubts that Singh was trying to instigate people to violently attack Muslims who were protesting India’s new racist citizenship laws which Modi's government had enacted in 2019. But, the company’s top public-policy executive, Ankhi Das—whose job involves lobbying the Indian government on behalf of Facebook—opposed applying hate speech rules to Singh and other Hindu-nationalist groups. She claimed that curbing hate speech from Hindu-nationalist groups and BJP politicians would affect Facebook’s business prospects in India. A few months later, these hate posts instigated a pogrom in Delhi where Mulisms were killed, raped, tortured, had their property set on fire, and made homless. While Das and Facebook were clear collaborators in the Delhi massacre, Das was not wrong. India’s government has a vindictive attitude towards companies and organizations that do not tow its line.

This combination of market power and political power gives India’s right wing the power to silence speech that it doesn’t agree with. Sangapali Aruna, who runs an organization which leverages technology to empower Dalits, was in a conversation with Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. She was talking about women’s safety on twitter following an incident where she was the victim of doxing. At the end of the conversation, Dorsey stood with women activists for a picture. They handed him a poster which read “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy.” When this picture went online, the backlash from Hindu nationalists and supporters of the caste system was swift and overwhelming. Fearing its loss of market share in India and action from the Indian government, Twitter apologized for that picture.

The Indian right wing has understood the power of the internet in propagating ideas. It is focused as much on using its brute strength to censor people on the internet as it is on disseminating ideas of Hindu supremacy. Quora, a platform which used to be used by techies to ask questions and give answers has evolved into a platform for Hindu-nationalist discussions and where Hindu nationalists can shape people’s perception on issues that matter to them. Many of the “answers” are outright lies. While Wikipedia has blacklisted a few Hindu-nationalist English “news” websites, the Hindu right wing is trying to gain a hold of Wikipedia in vernacular Indian languages where the most prominent scholars tend to be upper-caste Hindus who have an affinity towards Hindu nationalism and can censor information that can threaten caste hierarchies and Hindu dominance.

As we try to re-democratize the internet, we need to be aware of social imbalances which exclude people from enjoying the freedoms of the internet and political majoritarianism which can threaten to capture a nascent internet democracy.

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As we learn to adapt to the internet society that captures almost all parts of our existence, the fair distribution of power and control in this new age remains strikingly imbalanced. Not only a handful of mega corporations in the West monopolize this new continuum of our existence, but they also effectively prohibit billions of people from accessing this unprecedent source of knowledge and intellect. Trillions of dollars concentrated in a few companies are spent to solidify the perception that the “internet” itself is Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a few others. People are constantly kept in the dark by these companies and effectively prohibited from learning about the alternatives. Their data is continuously harvested for reasons unknown. As such, the most vital question that needs to be resolved as we are further connected to each other by the minute is that how we are to democratize the internet. Traditional colonialism may be for the most part dead, but the few privileged classes in the West still has an immensely tight grip on the rest of humanity. Christopher Wylie’s “Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America” clearly illustrated how data collected by Facebook in exchange for free access to its platform allowed private companies to carry massive psychological campaigns on entire societies. They first use smaller datasets to test their influence on smaller societies located in one of the former colonies, where their actions can go completely unchecked. And Wylie shows that the immense data that Facebook harvests is then used in the Western societies that allow these companies to safely exist in the first place. This is not the first time in recent history that a source of power is concentrated in the hands of the few. However, this is certainly the first time in history that a few companies have complete power as to determine how we think and act. In this regard, the power concentration of today is a lot scarier than the monopoly Standard Oil had in the early 20th Century. A few companies in the world have a dominion over our minds. And this is simply unacceptable. It is not possible to be free in the age of the internet where the central mechanism of how we are connected to one another is owned and manipulated by a few entities. The mission is clear: we need to break these monopolies and intervene in this market failure. But how can we achieve this mountain of a task? The challenge lies in the fact that we live in broken societies; we are controlled by crooked politicians who worship money and power. The monopolies of our current age have immense financial resources, and they have certainly enough of it to influence our political agendas. Assuming that “We the People” can define our destiny as a society, we need to take immediate action in how we democratize this next medium of human existence. First and foremost, we cannot simply allow hundreds of years of inequalities to persist in this new age. We have to accept knowledge as a basic human right and provide all tools and basic knowledge necessary to allow people to make the best use of what the web offers to them. This does not mean that we should destroy all differences in wealth and power overnight; however, it means that the next generation of humans must be allowed to have equal opportunities in their access to knowledge and intellectual growth. Even though it goes against the long-established patent rights, it is in the government’s, and the people’s, best interest to nationalize certain patents and allow free access to the use of them. Most groundbreaking scientific patents are a result of billions of dollars of government investment, meaning they were directly funded by the taxpayers. We cannot allow risks to be collectivized while allowing profits to be privatized. It is in the right of the people to seize control of what belongs to them and allow the new generation to truly write their own destinies. A seizure and emancipation of patents would allow cheap reproduction of hardware and software around the world. This would necessarily mean that hundreds of millions of people may get their hands-on machines that would fully allow them to truly connect with the web. However, such a scenario on its own does not guarantee that people would be truly freed. The bright and able minds of the world have to come together to write user-friendly online manuals and perhaps digital classes to teach ordinary people of all ages how to best utilize the machines they have. Governments are for the most part incredibly inapt in equipping their people with the necessary knowledge to bring about social mobility. As such, even though perhaps we can trust our power as the people to free some patents, we cannot rely solely on the government to educate people in how to use computers for attaining knowledge. I believe this will necessarily be a collective effort of dedicated idealists around the world. Another issue that needs to be resolved in democratizing the internet is the monopolies in existence. Will they simply wither away if people know that they can use safe alternatives? I do not believe that it will be the case; human beings are strange creatures after all, and the “sexy” services and hardware provided by the 21st Century monopolies are highly attractive to them. They do not even realize that they are being kept in the dark; their minds are controlled by people unknown to us, and they keep living in an exquisite Truman Show. As such, do we proceed with breaking Facebook and Google into smaller pieces? And even if we can, how are we to deal with the Chinese internet giants? Does the humanity need to live in completely segregated online worlds? Or can we unilaterally breakdown the CCP’s monopoly over the Chinese internet? The problems are relatively easy to identify, but the solutions seem to be a lot more complicated.

Revision 21r21 - 17 Oct 2021 - 20:52:07 - NuriCemAlbayrak
Revision 20r20 - 10 Oct 2020 - 13:34:47 - ConradNoronha
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