The economy of misinformation!

 

Some fascinating stories in circulation on the web today.

• Earth is flat.

• 'Moon landing' was a conspiracy, it never happened.

• Herbs cure COVID19.

• Homosexuality is a disorder and it can be cured by Yoga.

• Our ‘race’ is the best.

• 'Motivation and passion' that is all that one needs to succeed in life.

All of the above is just plain untrue, misleading and utter bullshit; but you know what? You can find ‘information’, ‘social media posts’ and ‘opinions’ masquerading as facts - supporting each of these bizarre theories on the internet. Not one, not two but millions upon millions of carefully crafted digital stories backing each of these salacious claims, not only exist but are only a recommendation away. Planted delicately in the way of your attention to make you stop, scroll, consume and click. The currency of your attention is what the spreaders of the misinformation are gunning for. These exist because vested interests are willing to pay for them from their endless pool of resources.

The economy of misinformation is HUGE, estimated at 250 billion USD, globally!

Misinformation, slander and scandals; sell like hotcakes.

Take a moment to imagine a group of people, who were born and brought up on these posts. Consider that they have lived their entire life surrounded by these details, would they ever accept contrasting information worthy of their attention? When they go on to the world wide web and search, they find millions who hold the same beliefs; what do they take away from it? That they are not alone and that there is no way, so many people can be wrong about something, which they believe to be true. So it must be true, the earth is indeed flat and to support that they have emphatic evidence right in front of their eyes, the ground below their feet is indeed flat; so how can the claim that earth is flat be untrue?

While you process that, let me present a thought exercise: look at all the things that you may have acquired in the last 2 years or so. List everything down, every item and then try to trace back, to the original instinct that got you to buy them. What was it? Did any form of advertisement, play a part?

Let me bring the third case into the mix; list down the last ten digital altercation that you may have had with others on various internet-based mediums - social media, messengers, video chat forums and others. What caused those brawls actually? What formed the basis of your opinions, the cause that you stood for? Was it in any way bolstered by what others expressed in solidarity with your views on the matter on the digital platform, that you frequent?

If yes, then you’ve been played with.

You’ve been manipulated by someone who devilishly weaponised the weaknesses of your mind, your ignorance; to further their own cause. They have benefited from the blind spots of your psychology, your behavioural glitches to make money out of your attention. How do you like the idea?

The illusion of knowledge, a false feeling of confidence and sense of community and belonging that these digital excursions (Social media) offer in exchange for time spend on the medium- draws people to them, irresistibly.

Let's take another case.

Imagine an ignorant but decent soul playing a silent spectator in an argumentative exchange going wild on a Whatsapp group that he is a part of, in which he found the group proposing 'earth is flat' presenting colourful reasons for it being the truth. In all honesty, with the sole objective of finding facts he launches youtube and types, "Earth is flat". Youtube returns the man, a ton of videos on that topic. He watches to one, and then moves on to the other and then to the next. After 2 hours of viewing different people eloquently presenting to an HD camera the fact that 'earth is flat' in a well-lit frame, he is confident. In his mind, he has the 'Knowledge' that he needs. He rages back to the group with his newly acquired 'intel and confidence' adds weight on to the side of the argument that purposed that 'earth is flat'. A few of these debates later the man now is a convert, an activist of the cause of dispelling every other version of the earth, circulating faster than earth is rotating on its axis. He considers it his responsibility to put things to record now.

A bubble of sorts is created in which he is trapped for eternity, an expansive universe in which he magically finds different people from different parts of the world who think exactly as he does? It is nothing but smart algorithms pushing on the side of conformance bias.

The principle to note in internet-based knowledge gathering and socialising exercises is that when you find people echoing your thoughts it does not always mean that what you are thinking is the right thing to think, it only means that like you the other people have also been subjected to the same stimulus and therefore they are reacting in a predictable way.

Confirmation is not the same as corroboration, more people saying the same thing does not make it right.

Consider this, let’s say your name is “Lav Kush” and a million people start calling you “Rohan” all of them addressing you by the wrong name at the same time and in a continuous and consistent manner; imagine 10 more people get added to that group of a million people who are calling you by a wrong name. What is the most likely name they are going to think you have? Lav Kush or Rohan? You know they would inadvertently add their voice to the building chorus of “Rohan”. "Rohan" is a fictitious name for you but it is a fact for those million others. Except that the million people, in this case, are simply wrong, but they are united in their misinformation and that makes the cumulative choristers appear much stronger than what is actually the right information - "Lav Kush".

This is how 'spread' of misinformation works.

The other question now is; when people have such an effective and powerful tool in their reach why do they not spread the right information? Are they inherently evil people? Why does it always have to be the wrong use of the tech? What sense does it make to use the tool wrongfully for indecent purposes? Why would someone be so taken up by the cause of spreading misinformation? These are valid questions. The answer is that - the truth is always ‘mundane’ and uninteresting because it does not dress up to impress it just puts clothes on.

Let me present to you two flavours of the same story, to further the argument.

The First Version: Iqbal is a hardworking student. He commits himself to routine and follows it through. He studies 6 hours a day, every day and then sleeps 8 hours a day, every day. He eats home-cooked meals most of the times. With sustained preparation, he cleared the prestigious UPSC entrance examination.

The second version: Iqbal was a bad student, he used to get into fights and all sorts of funny stuff back in school. His teachers and family members were equally worried about the prospects of his future. One day, while strolling back from school he met a sage who gave him a miracle filled sweet, he ate it and from that day onwards he was transformed. He started studying 16 hours a day, he would not even need to sleep for more than 4 hours a day and he constantly just kept on working. As a result, he cracked the prestigious UPSC entrance examination.

Both versions of the story offer the same outcome “Iqbal cleared the prestigious UPSC entrance examination” but which one do you think will sell more? First or second? We know the answer is going to be second.

Why?

The second story, forces leading questions on to the readers. Has a hint of mystery in it, waiting to be unravelled, some like these.

•Are miracles possible?

•Sages have transformative capabilities.

•Who was this sage, could we also seek his blessing?

•16 hours of study is possible, can be tried out. All of those who do not put in those kinds of hours are stupid nincompoops and are bound to fail.

•Sleep is not important at all; 4 hours is just about fine.

The first one, will not get anyone excited, it is as boring as a bowl of khichri. It is not exciting and that is enough to drive people away from it. But we can't say the same thing for the 2nd version, which appears straight from the movies.

That is how the business of fake news, conspiracy theories and propagandist narratives work.

It plants juicy connivance at the heart of an earthly event to get people interested, in the story. Constant and colourful reinforcement is supplied. Different people use this hunger (vulnerability of the human mind) for mystery in different forms.

Tech giants - Deploy powerful and pervasive algorithms to supply an abundance, the never-ending flow of content to satiated our senses by confirming to our beliefs, trapping us in our own bubble and yet keeping us hungry, at the same time by furnishing a variety of overproduced agenda-driven content, often for free. They grow audiences by popularising biases which they monetise for their economic gains. They sell our attention to corporations that are willing to place advertisements of their products somewhere in the content for us to consume and then get persuaded to buy.

Political parties use it to generate narratives that suit their politics. They create grand distractions to blind people of real issues/shield their failures. False enemies are erected so that people remain busy fighting them while they make the hay. Accountability is abdicated by confusing public consciences in an endless maze. News organisation and social media firms are paid to do the job. We are witnessing one right now in the country. We've become the 2nd most infected with COVID19 as a country, China is walking over our toes, the economy has plunged by 24%, and joblessness is at its peak and all we are being offered is scandalous collusion of an actor who died.

Corporations - They plug their products where the eyeballs are to boost growth prospects. You can’t buy a product that you have not seen or heard about. So wherever most people are listening becomes the essential place for organisations to advertise. They willingly pay the tech giants for creating these vast networks of disbelieves and misinformation appearing as reality and truth.

Regular people - They have a smartphone with a cheap data connection and nothing better to do with their time. So they hog on it, endlessly. Consumption becomes the easiest and effortless way to spend time.

Very few people have actually studied psychology and human behaviour well enough to avoid falling in these traps as a result they allow platforms to trade their attention for their profit. In the end, capital wins because these spaces are made available to the highest bidder; truth does not matter as much as confirmation bias does. Ordinary users unknowingly grow these monsters by feeding them with their attention. For short term pleasure, they lose long term control. Are you willing to squander your senses to the chorale around you? If not then, delete your social media accounts right now, limit your news consumption (preferably to print). Use your time productively in something useful, something constructive. You'll be better served.

I’m linking my article on digital minimalism, here for you to see the ways in which you can shield yourself from the damage the internet can do to you.

Good luck and stay safe.

#MeToo & Us!

Half a million people responded to a tweet from actress Alyssa Milano within 24 hours of her asking anyone who has ever been 'sexually harassed or assaulted' to reply to her post, she wanted to demonstrate the scale of the problem and thus was born the most successful and the most scary movement of our time - #Metoo. In the week since, there has been a flurry of posts leveling acquisition against many high profile men in entertainment, politics, academics, business and in social life. Last autumn a watershed moment in the history of mankind happened with painful revelation and in less than a year, victims from all over the world .. of all genders, social and economic background have come out with their horrific stories, each one more painful and daunting than the previous. Ever since Tanushree broke her silence on her agony.. spotlight of sorts have got fixed on the issue, at least in the Indian context .. many have come forward too with their stories implicating some very senior, accomplished and respected people. The tainted names include journalists, writers, politicians, businessmen, actors, directors, singers, music composers - in short, it is profession agnostic.

We grew up learning that humans are social animals .. we are however reminded that it is not true for all of us, some of us, are just animals dressed as humans. We live, learn and grow together but that does not necessarily make us alike. Many among us are predators, cold-blooded criminals ... with a crooked sense of belonging and we surely did not need a #MeToo movement to know this for a fact. Crime against women both physical and sexual in nature are brazenly normalized in our society.  I wrote an article on 7th Jan 2017, titled “Crime Against Women - Why?”

Liking it here (https://lkstates.blogspot.com/2017/01/crime-against-women-why.html ). I won’t repeat what I wrote back then .. but would say that in that article I tried dealing with the “why” part of it and in my own limited way suggest “what” could perhaps be a remedy. Oppression of women, inequality and organized injustice to the gender has a long condemnable history which has been kept under tight covers carefully by those in power .. occasional whispers have always surfaced but nothing to the tune of what is happening now. Silence is no longer a companion to the atrocities .. Skeletons are falling off the closet people are making conscious effort to stir the still waters .. and I couldn’t be happier to know that the truth is coming out, finally. Newspapers are tired of carrying the dead weight of rapes happening across the length and the breadth of our country, it is not merely a coincidence that what is the political capital of India is also the rape capital of the largest democracy of the world. 

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” for the longest time I’ve resisted this philosophy because as a thinking individual I have firmly held that neutrality is the key unless we distance ourselves from the extremes we can’t make a fair assessment or an objective evaluation of the situation. When you subscribe to a certain viewpoint .. you tend to give it preference. But recent developments have shaken that belief a little bit... Look at the names that have come to the fore, MJ Akbar, Pachori, Nana Patekar — these are all, educated, successful, wealthy, politically connected and thus powerful men.

Power must have had a role to play in this. We will come back to the power and some of the other elements that I think are causing these but before we get there I’d like to address the elephant in the room which has to do with trivializing the incident because it is being reported late or by someone who isn’t seen perhaps as a credible figure. And I’m picking this up from an incident that happened to me at the Bangalore airport, I was returning to Hyderabad after a fulfilling day at work and was one among 100 other people who had queued up in the line for security check. I was talking to my mother on the phone in Bhojpuri ( 2nd most popular dialect of Bihar, Magahi is the most spoken one. I’m fluent in both. if you happen to know someone from my home state who says Maithili is the most popular .. you should just ignore that person because .. it is not true) was louder than my usual self because I carry an Airtel SIM card and if you do too you’d know that sometimes speaking louder is the only way to send your voice over to the other side. The gentleman standing behind me .. asked me politely if I was from Bihar .. I responded happily and in a hurried manner, we completed the first 3 questions .. which part of Bihar .. why here .. and how traveling is a pain etc and went back to minding our own businesses. That is when another gentleman wrecked the topic of Tanushree Dutta’s indelicate commentary on Nana, the actor most of us love. I was quietly listening while also surfing through my Twitter timeline. He said that Tanushree is trying to defame Nana to grab limelight which she has lost long back, the person added how her career was nearly over and if it wasn’t for this controversy none of us would even talk about her and then another friend of his pulled out a video from YouTube of one of her songs in which she is seen getting comfortable with Imran Hashmi in a scene that is clearly written to flame passion. The person based his argument on her openness in the song and her being out of work to suggest that it was all false. Nana should file a case against her and how media should ban her etc. A few unparliamentary comments were also made with a few gross remarks on women in the entertainment industry.. at this point, I felt obligated to interject. I wanted to say very many things not all in polite tone but maintaining how unimportant their beliefs were to me and that the setting wasn’t suitable for an argument .. I just said that Tanushree hasn’t denied filming that scene .. it had her consent and therefore she isn’t voicing displeasure on that incidence but the other one in which she felt violated by Nana. I also said that it would have been wonderful if she made her telling to form an FIR back then .. but then truth is not perishable and therefore is not guided by the limitation of expiration. if what she is saying is correct .. she can say it now, a decade later even a century after the incident. Doesn’t matter all that much. Dignity is everyone’s right .. no matter what they wear, how they talk, which part of the world they come from or how they make their money or their gender for that matter.. while I was making my argument I got to the yellow line, which meant that I had to cross over, allow the security personnel to go about his business .. I collected my belonging from the conveyer .. thanked the CISF jawan and walked towards my boarding gate. Telling myself that idiots like those come in the way of creating equitable society and then .. boarded . 

By means of this article, I’m not trying to sit in judgment on what happened. I think due constitutional process should decide punishment after free and fair investigation & trail, hurling accusation doesn’t make someone a criminal. Civil society maintains that unless proven otherwise no one is guilty and certainly not of a crime that can’t be substantiated by hardcore evidence and facts. Those being accused are also equal citizens and deserve to be heard .. we know the legal process and we also know how difficult it is to prove a dirty look or an inappropriate touch. In all likelihood, 95% of criminals will walk free leaving the victim sore, ridiculed and perhaps more melancholic. It is sad, and the order of the day .. but does that make #MeToo inconsequential, certainly not.

In many bold and meaningful ways .. this social media campaign has done three important things which will bring about positive change. Let’s not forget all historic changes have had similar revolutionary past ( not the sexual oppression but people voicing against injustice), from voting rights for women in the US to the most recent abolishment of triple talaq, allowing women the legal right to enter places of worship like Haji Malang Dargah in Bombay , Shani Signapur temple in the west, also the Sabarimala temple visiting rights. Injustice .. needs united voices and therefore I say, this movement will not go to waste. It won’t be the Lokpal Andolan. 

Coming back to the three things. 

Unite voices for meaningful change: This movement gave the weak voice, the Internet got people together, amplified the concern to the right tune. It gave people the belief and courage needed to feel for one another. I salute all of those who have come out, it wouldn’t have been easy.

Detailed narration to change behavior: Victims have literally re-lived the horror in documenting what is it that they had to go through. It serves the twin purpose of alerting others of being mindful of such advances at the same time give those who would like to arrest situations like this enough details to formulate policies and encourage social norms to make our society a better place.

The power of culture: Over 95% of these incidences have happened at the place of work, which underlines the need to re-look at the culture that makes and feeds such monsters. Balancing of power, holding people accountable and creating an open environment which encourages people to blow the whistle is needed.

Harassment is born out of inequality either of real terms or of perceived value. Low self-moral fed by fear is the key reason why victims did not react right at the very first move that the predator made, in my view; reasons could range from economic liability to the desire to succeed in career to lack of support or an understanding or one being an introvert personality trying to avoid confrontation. 

It is upon us to create a just society, one which is based on respect, one that doesn’t violate personal space, one that does not believe that the weaker is to be exploited carelessly. We have to encourage people to speak .. tell their stories .. if needed provide them with security, not just emotional but also financial and legal to enable them to live a dignified life. 

If you let someone walk over you .. you are guilty of not protecting your own dignity. 

I render my support to every victim and offer my apologies on behalf of all from my gender. May you win!!