ICT4Peace is delighted to release Episode 2 of Brown Bag, the ICT4Peace podcast series on social media, politics, democracy and society from a Global South perspective, hosted and produced by ICT4Peace Foundation’s Special Advisor, Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa.
In Episode 2, Hattotuwa speaks with Meenakshi Ganguli, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. Listen to the podcast on SoundCloud, or use the embedded player below, which also lists previous episodes. Brown Bag is also on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts. This production of this podcast series is supported by the Daniel Gablinger Foundation.
In this podcast, Ganguly starts off with flagging how South Asia changed because of the pandemic, from perspectives anchored to democratic governance, human rights, social media’s ab/use, and the implications of syndromic surveillance on activism. She stresses the degree to which an emphasis on profit, but social media companies, had had particularly devastating consequences for societies in the Global South. Ganguly provides a comprehensive contemporary snapshot of the region’s socio-economic, political, and socio-technological challenges, to contexts ranging from post-Taliban rule Afghanistan, to India, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.
In dealing with the damage done to social cohesion, and democracy by social media, Ganguly stresses the degree to which social media is also integral to all communications, and the cohesion of society, in South Asia. In this, she concurs with Hattotuwa in flagging how the story around social media’s role in eroding democracy is one that’s often covered more, and simplistically, without considering how inextricably entwined it is in the everyday lives of billions. This said, Ganguly again stresses how a profit orientation, and the imperative to generate more customers, resulted in significant harms to South Asia’s social fabric wrought by Silicon Valley’s misguided approaches. Ganguly goes into how mobile messaging, social media, and the content, as well as commentary enabled by digital media platforms, were harnessed by authoritarians, and populists.
During the pandemic, she notes how these trends expanded, and accelerated, given how many more were online, including children – which she says is something advertisers very quickly realised. Pivoting to disinformation, from a South Asian context, and perspective, Ganguly then addresses the degree to which social media platforms are captive to content, from a profit-orientation, they don’t want to meaningfully govern, leading to an increasing divergence between what policies state, and what’s meaningfully done to stop or stymie the growth of harms (also connected to structural racism in many countries). She also speaks of significant truth-decay, and how disinformation has helped entrench twisted, false, misleading worldviews amongst millions.
On the question of regulation, Ganguly offers a grounded perspective, speaking to both the need, but from an Indian context in particular, the challenges around addressing growing government fiat and considerations around staff safety, and security.
Ganguly contemplates what the post-pandemic South Asian landscape for democracy, and activism will look like, given the simultaneous interplay of help, and harm brought about by social media’s undeniable role in the region’s future. Here too, Ganguly avoids simplistic frames, and claims, and instead paints a nuanced picture of the region’s struggles – capturing the potential of social media to hold leaders to account, and strengthen activism, as well as its capture by populists, and authoritarians, to engineer industrial disinformation campaigns to keep them in power, and silence those who question them.
Ganguly ends by noting that accountability for social media platforms is paramount, and linked to greater, stronger regulation.