Wire, a website that identifies as a news portal, fell victim to a prank this month. It appears that someone or a group has made up a story that some activists in India are conditioned to buy – that social media giant Meta, formerly known as Facebook Inc., is with the Indian government. . and sold this lemon Wire, Some argue that the website was not a victim, and that it coined the story to attract more people to donate money for its efforts to end a right-wing regime in India. I just don’t believe in him. Indian workers are not deceitful, they are of simple nature.
what happened that Wire Some “investigative” stories ran, claiming that Meta, which owns Instagram, had given special privileges to Amit Malviya, the head of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s social media cell, which he did not like. The report states that this information was given to him by a source inside Meta.
The premise is so silly that it would have been a red flag for any professional news desk. But this is the kind of conspiracy that activists easily believe. To back up its story, The Wire cited an email from a senior Meta official, which turned out to be fabricated. The other back-ups of the story were also gimmicky. Thus, another pious organization that mourned the “fake news” itself was its transmitter. No Nobel for you.
Meta is a low-hanging fruit for a variety of activists around the world. How Meta became the arch-villain of our times has a definite origin story that’s very different from the traditional reason that giant corporations are despised by people who claim they have empathy. However, hatred of meta has nothing to do with empathy.
The Western media, which still wields extraordinary influence over how the world should think about politics, books, movies, food and animals, has yet to forgive Facebook for democratizing opinion. “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once did without harming the community only after a glass of wine… but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel laureate. It’s idiots There is invasion,” said author Umberto Eco, who won the Nobel, of course. Not many people in the Western intellectual establishment would put it that way publicly, but they probably believe that only certain people are qualified to broadcast opinions. In any case, social media undermined the financial power and social prestige of the Western intellectual system, and Facebook was the mascot of this sudden revolution.
The hostility towards Facebook has presented the Western media with its worst analysis of human society – that fake news makes right-wing parties win elections. The fact is the opposite. The popularity of the right wing and its allies travels more to fake news than to news that is not in their favor. Very simply, fake news that isn’t popular won’t travel.
The Western mainstream media has successfully created the impression that Meta is an immoral, intrusive corporation. Indian activists, including “search journalists”, who draw a reputation from the West for their moral direction and Western approval, have become foot soldiers in a class war between the old elite of information and the corporation that erodes their influence.
A few months ago, an organization called The Reporters Collective published a short series of “discovery” stories, arguing that Facebook was kind to the BJP’s fake news system by shutting down more Congress proxy pages than its Congress party counterpart. was. With fake news than with BJP proxy. But the evidence was sketchy. Also, the website claimed in one of its titles, “Facebook accuses BJP less than others of India’s election ads”. But the fact remains that Facebook’s algorithm rewards popular ads by making them cheaper per impression or link click. So the fact remains that the BJP ads were cheaper than the Congress, because the BJP is more popular than the Congress.
One piece of circumstantial evidence for the shoddy nature of many of these proactive efforts is that they are generally not picked up by respectable US newspapers that seek to damage Facebook’s reputation, but not at the cost of its own reputation. After an American social media giant teamed up with a political party in India to help win an election, it would be the kind of story that mainstream American media would love. So far, new York Times, and other major US newspapers did not take these reports seriously. The stories were done by Al Jazeera.
Facebook has long brought out the worst among Indian activists as they inadvertently become a pawn in a sophisticated battle that is going on. A few years ago, when Facebook wanted to give free but limited Internet connections to the poor, activists sabotaged the effort, citing the abstract theology that the Internet should be all or nothing. Campaigns have also been run against the user condition of those Facebook apps which are full of invasive.
There was a time when only corporations and the wealthy could advertise their products. Today, because of social media, small companies can directly reach consumers by spending less than a few hundred rupees a day. Plus, Meta is eliminating the powerful middlemen that stand between the cast and you. Most of the things such activists denigrate are things that are more useful to us than their activism. Just like meta.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist and producer of the Netflix series ‘Decauld’.
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