Facebook Fears Loss of Face, Takes Measures to Allay Concerns

Synopsis
The social media giant is being questioned by govts across the world, asking it be subjected to local regulations. India too has taken a strong position.

NEW DELHI: The growing global backlash on concerns of privacy and the use of its platforms such as WhatsApp to spread fake news has forced social media giant Facebook to take several measures using technology as well as reaching out to policy makers and academic community to allay these concerns.

Facebook is investing in technology and hiring thousands of people to weed out fake profiles often associated with spreading false news, and WhatsApp has begun testing tools to inform users when a message is originally composed and forwarded, people familiar with the development said. It is also blocking advertisements to pages that repeatedly spread false news, removing financial incentives.

Facebook has also stepped up hiring more public policy experts in its teams to engage with governments. Facebook is also expanding to Instagram, the photo sharing site, a service to people who seek drugs, to reach out to counselling centres and prevent drug abuse, they said. Experts, however, said it needs to do more.

"The expectations from Facebook have dramatically changed, because it is having a huge impact on the society," said Soumitra Dutta, professor at Cornell University in operations, technology and information management area. "It is an awakening of a company to the future since Facebook is no more just an online company," he said, talking about the recent controversies sparked off by Facebook.

Facebook also realises that. It has begun an exercise to hire a massive number of executives in public policy and government affairs roles across the world including in India as it battles multiple governments over privacy and data sharing. The company currently has close to 100 positions open in this area with around four roles in India.

The social media giant is being questioned by governments in Germany, Singapore, the US and even in India, asking it be subjected to local regulations. India too has taken a strong position over the recent Facebook debacle.

While the Indian government has shot multiple letters to the Menlo Park, California-headquartered firm after the revelations over illegal data mining by Cambridge Analytica came to light, the recent episodes of lynching fuelled by rumours spread through WhatsApp network has made matters worse for the company in India. WhatsApp's ambitious plan to launch a full-fledged payment service in the country over the Unified Payment Interface is also stuck, pending approvals.

According to officials in the know, WhatsApp doesn't have an independent public policy team in India and has been engaging with the government on key issues through the Facebook team.

ET had reported in April that the Facebook-owned messaging app, which has 1.3 billion users globally and its largest user base in India, is looking for a country head. This is the first full-time hire for WhatsApp in India where the app has more than 200 million monthly active users. It is not clear if the position has been filled so far. "There is a fine line between consumer privacy and using their data for business gains and Facebook has to realise that," Dutta said.

"Most of the technology companies try to get away on the pretense that they don't understand societal norms or political aspects of the products that they are building. But that has to change. Companies can't be blind to it anymore since they are having a huge impact on society. So it's good that companies like Facebook are trying to build new talent and capabilities in the company, I look at it as a positive," said Dutta who served as the founding dean of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business till January this year.

Experts like Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bengaluru-based think tank Centre for Internet and Society, echoed similar views when he said Facebook needs to do a lot more to tackle the menace of fake news since they have started the problem. "They have to expand their funding for fact checkers dramatically, because Facebook and Google both have destroyed traditional media so the business model for real news has been replaced with business model for fake news," he said. Abraham proposes a "heavy handed" approach for Facebook and WhatsApp now to tackle the issue by funding at least 30 fact checking organisations and having ways to flag not just forwarded content but also finding a way to get them fact checked since messages are end to end encrypted on their platform.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Union minister for electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad also touched upon this aspect when he said social media companies have to be more "accountable, responsible and vigilant". "They can't say that we are a technology company and we have created a product and now we don't know what to do," he said. If companies like Whatsapp are reaping huge monetary gains from India, they also have to take security of its people more seriously, the minister said.

WhatsApp has proposed using technologies such as machine learning, labelling forwarded messages and engaging with the civil society and academicians to stem the spread of fake and malicious content through its channel in India which has caused multiple deaths across dozen Indian states.