Looking beyond privacy and platform governance: A case for reorienting public discourse in India 

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Lokendra Sharma

The need for reorienting public discourse on the social media ecosystem cannot be more pressing. Over the last few years, a string of events have cemented the dominance of privacy and platform governance issues: first, the Puttaswamy judgement in 2017 that established the right to privacy; second, the 2021 social media intermediary rules established by the government under the IT Act of 2000; third, reporting in 2023 and 2024 that pointed out how India issues some of the highest takedown requests across platforms; fourth, government’s clash with WhatsApp on encryption that ultimately led the latter to warn that it would exit the market if forced to break encryption. Notwithstanding their importance for people’s lives and the health of our body politic, they are not the most significant issues that India currently faces.

I argue that the use of social media for waging influence operations is the most significant issue that should animate public, activists, and policymakers alike. I define the key parameter for making this choice — ‘significance’ — using the following criteria: First, is the issue long-term? Second, how pervasive and ‘unseen’ is the impact?

Having defined the parameter, let me take up the three social media issues one-by-one.

Information Age’s impact on power and legitimacy

As argued by Pranay Kotasthane and Nitin Pai (2023) in their book chapter ‘Interrogating Power and Legitimacy in the Information Age from an Indian Perspective’, the transition from the Industrial to Information Age impacts the idea of both power and legitimacy in international politics. Social media platforms give historically unprecedented access to ‘others’ to influence Indian society.

When Microsoft warned earlier this year that China may attempt to influence the 2024 general elections in India using AI-generated content on social media, tackling influence operations became an urgent, immediate problem for the latter.

With India expected to add millions of users to the internet (and thereby social media) and with the Information Age here to stay, the threat of influence operations is a long-term one. The effects of influence operations, while occasionally acknowledged by India’s elites, would largely go unseen and unchecked for individual users who would just be ‘nudged’ to see things in a particular way. Disinformation campaigns that target the very idea of reality such that people find it difficult to trust any (source of) information are also a component of the influence operations.

Challenges that are visible

When it comes to privacy and platform governance, both exhibit a long term cat-and-mouse game between the social media platform and the executive/regulator with people getting trapped in this internecine conflict. However, both of these issues are seen and felt by individuals and elites alike. Unlike influence operations, privacy and platform governance are not unseen — that is, the contours of the latter are well-known.

If contours of an issue are seen and its effects well-known, greater politico-societal efforts would be directed to address them even if they are intractable.

Influence operations: Unseen threat

But if effects of an issue are unseen yet pervasive, it is more likely to have a deeper impact (both cognitively at individual level, and collectively at societal level). This is the case with influence operations. Algorithm bias is also potentially an issue that satisfies the criteria for significance, especially when it intersects with influence operations. That is, when algorithms are (mis)used or altered to deliver specific content to influence minds.

While all states engage in mounting influence operations irrespective of regime type, liberal democracies with largely unhindered information flows are particularly susceptible. Authoritarian states whose regime stability depends on a close and controlled domestic information environment, on the other hand, are comparatively better off. At the same time, there are economic and social costs of restricting information flows and liberal democracies are more resilient against uncontrolled information flows as compared to their authoritarian counterparts.

Liberal democracies find it very difficult to reconcile countering influence operations on the one hand, and keeping information flows open on the other. Even in a situation where the state has developed the capacity to mount a counter offensive, such powers in the hands of a state means that it can be used against their own citizens — especially so in the case of democracies tilting towards the illiberal end of the liberal-illiberal spectrum. While there may not be convincing answers to solving the conundrum described above at the moment, reorienting the public discourse with more focus on influence operations would mean that greater politico-societal efforts would be directed towards finding such answers.

Lokendra Sharma is a Research Analyst with the High-Tech Geopolitics Programme at the Takshashila Institution, Bengaluru.