Comment by Riaz Haq on August 31, 2020 at 10:33am

How to solve one billion complaints
The former head of Twitter India's news, politics, and government on the e-governance platform built for users and what he learned from it

https://restofworld.org/2020/raheel-khursheed-twitter-seva-india/

A former journalist for the local affiliate of CNN, Raheel Khursheed joined Twitter in 2014 as its first head of news, politics, and government in India. In 2016, he launched Twitter Seva, an e-governance platform that enabled Indian citizens to request assistance from government ministries through mentions on Twitter. Khursheed left Twitter in 2018 and has since co-founded a series of startups, including the video-streaming platform-as-a-service Laminar Global.

How do you solve a problem like one billion complaints?
Public systems in India are overstretched. Take the railway, for example, which carries more than 8 billion passengers a year. That scale often translates into apathy on the government’s end regarding any complaints about public services. It wasn’t as though the government didn’t have a complaint system earlier. But you would call a number, and that would fundamentally be the end of it. Who took your call, what happened to that call: nobody quite knew.

I saw that a lot of traditional hierarchies were flattening on Twitter: a lot of regular people tagging high powered ministers and getting almost immediate responses, which is rare in India. I was asking myself: Where can I go with this next? Twitter Seva, which means Twitter service, was the natural progression.

Our system brought the complaints under sunlight. When you put these complaints on our platform, they are public. If there is prominence attached to that complaint — if an editor, influencer, or the community has seen it — the imperative to respond is much higher. You get shamed if you don’t respond.

I remember an incident where a man was traveling on a train, and the air-conditioning was not working. When he told the staff, nobody listened. And then he tweeted, and within minutes, he had staff in the coach working to fix the problem. They even checked to see if he was satisfied with the outcome.

We built a framework of metrics. The focus suddenly went from how many followers to what your presence on your platform was worth. It was about how soon you could resolve an issue. We moved the product from a vanity metric to an impact metric.

It just takes one early adopter
The obvious challenge was getting the government to sign on. People didn’t immediately see the benefit of it. I had gone to the Mumbai police and the Delhi police repeatedly, and those conversations didn’t go anywhere.

So we started this experiment with the Bangalore police. We built this on the police commissioner being an early adopter of the platform, who was super sold on it. We convinced him that he could do a lot more with the platform, and that we could create a workflow to help. He generously opened up his organization for us to conduct this experiment.

We manually kept track of each of their Twitter mentions and assigned it to the relevant officer to resolve the issues tweeted. We eventually automated the process, and at its peak, the Bangalore police were addressing 500 tickets a day from Twitter.

Fundamentally, this created a virtuous circle, where we had government officers respond to complaints, and then immediately, people would praise them. It’s not as if people in government are doing their jobs and getting patted on their backs every day. It was a feedback loop — and the department got hooked on resolving issues even faster.

People thought, “If the railways can do it, then we can too.” Once they realized we had an actual workflow for them, it wasn’t a hard sell. By the time I left Twitter, we had rolled Twitter Seva out within at least 15 ministries.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 10, 2020 at 6:35pm

41 rights groups from across the world write to #Facebook's Zuckerberg, demand Ankhi Das's removal from her role in the company “should the audit or investigation reinforce the details of The Wall Street Journal”. #Islamophobia #HateSpeech #Modi #BJP https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/ankhi-das-facebook-india-audit_...

The audit had reportedly been triggered by Wall Street Journal reports which showed Das had “opposed applying hate-speech rules” to at least four individuals and groups linked with the BJP, saying it would hurt the company’s business prospects in India. Das also supported Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the 2014 Indian general elections and openly talked of efforts to help the BJP win, saying the company “lit a fire” to Modi’s social media campaign, WSJ had reported.

Buzzfeed’s Pranav Dixit reported that Das had last month apologised to employees in the company for sharing a post in 2019 which called India’s Muslims a “degenerate community”. The post had been shared at a time the country was witnessing widespread protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens.

The non-governmental rights organisations from across the world, who wrote to Zuckerberg on Wednesday, demanded that Ankhi Das be removed from her role in the company “should the audit or investigation reinforce the details of The Wall Street Journal”.

Their letter said that the audit of Facebook India “must be removed entirely from the influence of the India office and jointly overseen by Menlo Park staff and civil society groups with expertise in Caste and Religious Bias.”

Time Magazine, which first reported on the audit in August, had said it was being conducted by the US law firm Foley Hoag and would include interviews with senior Facebook staff and members of civil society in India.

Signatories to the letter said that “mass riots in India spurred on by content posted on Facebook have been occurring for at least seven years.”

“A mislabeled video on social media was instrumental in stoking the horrific 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in which 62 people were killed. A BJP politician was even arrested for sharing the video. This should have been enough to prompt Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook to take a step back from operations and conduct a human rights audit to ensure Facebook had the necessary corporate competencies and had taken human rights into account. Despite all this, the company decided to expand in India without hesitation. ”

The letter cited international watchdogs and academics, saying “circumstances in India show the potential for genocide.”

“Mr. Zuckerberg, when you said “never again” after Myanmar, did you actually mean “Over and over again?” Myanmar is not an aberration. We are seeing the same playbook that was used to incite genocide in Rwanda in 1994 playing out in India. Then, radio broadcasts from government radio stations spread misinformation that helped incite ordinary citizens to take part in the massacres of their neighbors. Now, instead of radio stations, events like the North East Delhi pogrom are stoked by misinformation and hate speech shared on Facebook.”

The signatories asked for Facebook to work with civil society groups and human rights activists in India.

Facebook executives in India were questioned by an Indian Parliamentary panel led by Shashi Tharoor last week.

Both BJP and Congress members of the panel accused the social media giant of colluding and influencing opinion, a charge denied by the company.

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A Delhi legislative assembly committee on peace and harmony found Facebook “prima facie guilty of a role” in the Delhi riots in February, panel chief Raghav Chadha had said late August, adding that the company should be treated as co-accused in the case.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 22, 2020 at 10:46am

“I Have Blood On My Hands”: A Whistleblower Data Scientist Says #Facebook Ignored Global #Political Manipulation. #Myanmar #Rohingya #India #Muslims #Hate #Islamophobia

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore...

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her LinkedIn profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.”

“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote.

The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

“I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” Zhang wrote.

These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo:

It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.
In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets... to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.
Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.”
In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that "he’d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch." Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote.
In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro–European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.
Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts— in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 2, 2020 at 8:13am

HISTORY: IDEA TO REALITY: NED (National Endowment For Democracy) AT 30

https://www.ned.org/about/history/

"In the aftermath of World War II, faced with threats to our democratic allies and without any mechanism to channel political assistance, U.S. policy makers resorted to covert means, secretly sending advisers, equipment, and funds to support newspapers and parties under siege in Europe. When it was revealed in the late 1960’s that some American PVO’s were receiving covert funding from the CIA to wage the battle of ideas at international forums, the Johnson Administration concluded that such funding should cease, recommending establishment of “a public-private mechanism” to fund overseas activities openly."

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Training for media students

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/715059-training-for-media-students

Islamabad:Women Media Centre in collaboration with the National Endowment for Democracy arranged a five-day electronic media training course for young aspiring journalists on the topic ‘Impact of Covid-19 pandemic on women and media in Pakistan’ at a local hotel here, says a press release.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 30, 2020 at 3:50pm

‘Perception Hacks’ and Other Potential Threats to the Election
In the final days of voting, election officials and cybersecurity experts are keeping a close eye on a range of possible ways foreign governments and other hackers could interfere.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/us/politics/2020-election-hackin...


None of these attacks amounted to much. But from the sprawling war room at United States Cyber Command to those monitoring the election at Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, experts are watching closely for more “perception hacks.” Those are smaller attacks that can be easily exaggerated into something bigger and potentially seized upon as evidence that the whole voting process is “rigged,” as President Trump has claimed it will be.

The phrase comes up every time Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security official responsible for making sure voting systems are secure, talks about the biggest vulnerabilities in this election. His worry is not a vast attack but a series of smaller ones, perhaps concentrated in swing states, whose effect is more psychological than real.

Perception hacks are just one of a range of issues occupying election officials and cybersecurity experts in the final days of voting — and their concerns will not end on Election Day.

One theory gaining ground inside American intelligence agencies is that the Russians, having made the point that they remain inside key American systems despite bolstered defenses and new offensive operations by Cyber Command, may sit out the next week — until it is clear whether the vote is close.

The Russian play, under this theory, would be to fan the flames of state-by-state election battles, generating or amplifying claims of fraud that would further undermine American confidence in the integrity of the election process.

The Iranians would continue their playbook, which American intelligence officials see as more akin to vandalism than serious hacking, filled with threats in mangled English.

------------------


Mr. Trump has already promoted the idea that mail-in ballots will be riddled with fraud and has sought to use small glitches in the distribution and return of mail ballots as evidence that the system cannot be trusted if the result goes against him.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a “public service announcement” recently about taking care to verify information before believing it or reposting it. But as some government officials concede, there is no remedy for a president who repeats unproven rumors and conspiracy theories — other than directly contradicting him.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 12, 2020 at 11:15am

#freespeech on #socialmedia that have also become so central to distributing news and opinion that they are a “town square”, says #Facebook's Zuckerberg. If you want to be part of the conversation you have no choice but to be there, soapbox in hand. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/10/22/how-to-deal-with-free-...

A tenth of Americans think social media are beneficial; almost two-thirds that they cause harm. Since February YouTube has identified over 200,000 “dangerous or misleading” videos on covid-19. Before the vote in 2016, 110m-130m adult Americans saw fake news. In Myanmar Facebook has been used to incite genocidal attacks against the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority (see article). Last week Samuel Paty, a teacher in France who used cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to talk about free speech, was murdered after a social-media campaign against him (see Obituary). The killer tweeted an image of Mr Paty’s severed head, lying in the street.

The tech firms’ shifting attempts to sterilise this cesspool mean that a handful of unelected executives are setting the boundaries of free speech (see Briefing). True, radio and tv share the responsibility for misinformation and Republican claims of bias are unproven—right-wing sources often top lists of the most popular items on Facebook and Twitter. But pressure is growing on the tech firms to restrict ever more material. In America the right fears that, urged on by a Democratic White House, Congress and their own employees, the firms’ bosses will follow left-leaning definitions of what is acceptable. Contrast that with the First Amendment’s broad licence to cause offence.

Elsewhere, governments have also used social media companies to go beyond the law, often without public debate. In London the Metropolitan Police requests that they take down legal, but troubling, posts. In June France’s Constitutional Council struck down a deal between the government and the tech companies because it curbed free speech—an initiative that is sure to be revisited after Mr Paty’s murder. Citing Western precedents, more authoritarian governments in countries such as Singapore expect the tech firms to restrict “fake news”—potentially including irksome criticism from opponents

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 12, 2020 at 11:15am

Trump “has a willing accomplice in Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — a megaphone that history’s worst autocrats could only dream of,” he (Sacha "Borat" Baron Cohen) continued, pointing to QAnon and a conspiracy theory video claiming masks cause the coronavirus that was viewed by millions before Facebook and YouTube took it down.

“The shared reality upon which democracy depends has been shredded,” Cohen stated. “It would all be hilarious if it weren’t so dangerous.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/11/09/sacha-...

https://youtu.be/rwP4SaGLRYk

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 24, 2021 at 11:45am

#Socialmedia #algorithms amplify the incendiary—the attacks, the misinformation, the conspiracy theories. What you see in your feeds isn’t up to you. That needs to change. @JoannaStern explores some solutions. #disinformation https://www.wsj.com/articles/social-media-algorithms-rule-how-we-se... via @WSJ

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we lost control of what we see, read—and even think—to the biggest social-media companies.

I put it right around 2016. That was the year Twitter and Instagram joined Facebook and YouTube in the algorithmic future. Ruled by robots programmed to keep our attention as long as possible, they promoted stuff we’d most likely tap, share or heart—and buried everything else.

Bye-bye, feeds that showed everything and everyone we followed in an unending, chronologically ordered river. Hello, high-energy feeds that popped with must-clicks.

At around the same time, Facebook—whose News Feed has been driven by algorithms since 2009—hid the setting to switch back to “Most Recent.”

No big deal, you probably thought, if you thought about it at all. Except these opaque algorithms didn’t only maximize news of T. Swift’s latest album drops. They also maximized the reach of the incendiary—the attacks, the misinformation, the conspiracy theories. They pushed us further into our own hyperpolarized filter bubbles.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 23, 2022 at 9:50pm

My Heart Belongs to Kashmir
An Analysis of a Pro-Indian Army Covert Influence Operation on Twitter


https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/india-twitter-takedown

On August 24, 2022, Twitter shared 15 datasets of information operations it identified and removed from the platform with researchers in the Twitter Moderation Research Consortium for independent analysis. One of these datasets included 1,198 accounts that tweeted about India and Pakistan. Twitter suspended the network for violating their Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy, and said that the presumptive country of origin was India. Our report builds on a report on this same network by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

The network tweeted primarily in English, but also in Hindi and Urdu. Accounts claimed to be proud Kashmiris and relatives of Indian soldiers. Tweets praised the Indian Army’s military successes and provision of services in India-administered Kashmir and criticized the militaries of China and Pakistan. Two accounts existed to target specific individuals who were perceived as enemies of the Indian government.

Twitter is not publicly attributing this network to any actor, and the open source evidence did not allow us to make any independent attribution. In the report, however, we highlight some noteworthy articles in the Indian press. These articles show that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have previously temporarily suspended the official accounts for the Chinar Corps. The Chinar Corps is a branch of the Indian army that operates in Kashmir. One article, citing Army officials as its source, says that the Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended for "coordinated inauthentic behavior." Our report also notes that the content of the Twitter network is consistent with the Chinar Corps’ objectives, praising the work of the Indian Army in India-occupied Kashmir, and that the official Chinar Corps Twitter account is one of the most mentioned or retweeted account in the network.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 23, 2022 at 10:01pm

US report unearths Indian army propaganda campaign

The purpose of the Twitter accounts in the network was to praise the Indian Army for their "military successes" and "provision of humanitarian services in India-administered Kashmir".

https://twitter.com/stanfordio/status/1572627130449821697?s=20&...

https://www.globalvillagespace.com/us-report-unearths-indian-army-p...

Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) recently published a report analyzing a pro-Indian Army propaganda campaign on social media.

To clarify, the Stanford Internet Observatory is a program of the Cyber Policy Center which is a joint initiative of the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies and the prestigious Stanford Law School in the US.

The report titled “My Heart Belongs to Kashmir: An Analysis of a Pro-Indian Army Covert Influence Operation on Twitter” takes note of a Twitter network that was recently suspended and concludes that the network was consistent with the Chinar Corps.

To clarify, the Chinar Corps is a Corps of the Indian Army that is presently located in Srinagar and responsible for military operations in the Kashmir Valley. Chinar Corps also has social media accounts where it consistently promotes a positive image of the Indian Army despite its internationally recognized human rights violations in Kashmir. Moreover, the social media accounts of Chinar Corps were suspended and blocked for short periods of time on multiple occasions for “coordinated inauthentic activity”.

Last month, Twitter identified a network of over 1000 accounts that tweeted about India and Pakistan. Twitter suspended the network for violating its Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy and said that the presumptive country of origin was India.

Indian propaganda?

The SIO report notes that while the network was not attributed to any actor or organization, there were many similarities to the Chinar Corps.

“The content of the Twitter network is consistent with the Chinar Corps’ objectives, praising the work of the Indian Army in India-occupied Kashmir,” the SIO report states.

The network was made up of several Twitter accounts posing as fake Kashmiris with images taken from elsewhere on the internet, for instance, Getty Stock Images.

“Tweets tagging journalists aimed either to bring events to the attention of reporters or to bring the reporter to the attention of followers—often in an apparent attempt to target the reporter for what was framed as anti-India content,” the report further revealed.

Moreover, the purpose of the Twitter accounts in the network was to praise the Indian Army for their “military successes” and “provision of humanitarian services in India-administered Kashmir”. The accounts also criticized Pakistan and China who are rivals of India.

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