Facebook's Business Models, Machinations & Modus Operandi in the Indian Market

An Open Message to the Facebook India Management

Dear Ajit Mohan 

As is mostly the case for sometime now, Facebook, and it's India operations, continue to disappoint.

How could a lobbyist and a PR person who was with Microsoft India earlier and whom your organization head-hunted, become so powerful in such a short time in your organization?

For those not too familiar with the background to this piece, here is a linked news item, with relevant excerpts, by way of background

The Journal also said that an executive - who was later identified as Ms Das - suggested to the company that punishing such violations by BJP workers "would damage (its) business prospects".

 According to a second report by the Journal Ms Das also "made internal postings over several years" detailing her support for the ruling BJP and disparaging its main rival - behaviour some staff saw as conflicting with the company's pledge to remain neutral in elections around the world.

It is unclear if her resignation is in any way connected to the hate speech controversy.

In a statement, Ajit Mohan, head of Facebook India, said Das was leaving Facebook to pursue her “interest in public service”.

Facebook's Aankhi Das, Audit & Privacy Issues in India 

Also read:  Top Facebook India Executive Leaves Company

Actually, behind her rather pompous designation, Aankhi Das was essentially the lobbyist hired specifically to make deep inroads into the Modi camp and into BJP and hence achieve FB's objective of rapidly increasing both the MAU (monthly active users) and the revenue from ads. Sure enough, the BJP handsomely helped Facebook achieve those targets by deploying over a hundred  thousand SM workers & volunteers and making SM the primary platform for disseminating propaganda, misinformation, falsehoods and hate.

Long story short, what I am saying emphatically is that what Aankhi Das would do once hired was clearly laid out with approval from the topmost managerial layers of Facebook and she set about her task diligently by cosying up to Modi & Shah and helping them in every way possible, neutrality, privacy & fairness be damned. As de facto chief of Facebook India, was she doing all this without the full backing & consent of FB's apex management? If you want us to believe that, you would want us to believe also that pigs can fly.

All this was noticed and written about too by some Indian journos & columnists. However what they wrote about was somewhat superficial, lacking the ballast of hard data & factual insights about what was going on inside Facebook India during those heady days when Zuckerberg & Sheryl Sandberg made multiple trips to India, when you organized a dramatised and orchestrated townhall with PM Modi at your Mountain View HQ and also when you sneakily tried to define FB as the internet itself for many Indian users in partnership with Mukesh Ambani's Reliance. Given a weak, disjointed and largely tech-unsavvy opposition, all this didn't create too many ripples within India except among the tech. activists. It was only when Bloomberg & the WSJ talked about your modus operandi in India and what you were really up to behind the facade of fairness, neutrality & ethical operations, that some Indians sat up & took notice and the international media picked up the story and gave it the visibility & the credibility that it deserved. 

We would never quite know the gory details about how, violating the trust of unsuspecting users and the TOS which new users sign into before opening their Facebook account, you blithely trod on privacy norms & agreements and made tons of data & sought-after analytics available to the BJP IT Cell which is your most important & biggest customer in India. These operations must have been clandestine, closely guarded and known to very few and whispered about internally by some FB India employees who suspected, but couldn't quite pin down, what was happening between some top FB officials in India and the BJP. It is precisely because of such business models & practices that several people in leadership roles within Facebook quit, and left in disgust because they just couldn't see eye-to-eye with what FB was doing by way of playing fast & footloose with privacy and by aligning itself with establishments the world over as part of their adopted business models. 

Were you sincere about a course correction, you should have unequivocally stated that after internal investigations, you have come to the conclusion that Aankhi Das had indeed violated your internal norms, business principles and laid-down out-of-bounds markers in several instances and hence, her services were being terminated. That would have however opened up the possibility of her spilling the beans about how she did what she did with the full backing & approval of the top management of FB. Ergo, platitudes  and goody-two-shoes statements from both employer & employee aside for the records, you haven't succeeded in pulling the wool over some of our eyes about what your real objectives are and about how your business models and your principles, or rather the lack of it and business ethics, remain unchanged.

Edit Update: To ensure that there is no change in existing relationships, flow of instructions, biases, slants & policies vis-a-vis the current administration, Facebook has decided to move WhatsApp's Director of public policy, Shivnath Thukral, to the position vacated by Aankhi Das. Who is Thukral? Here is an introductory snippet:

Shivnath Thukral is a former journalist who has worked with Facebook since 2017. He is known to have worked for the BJP's digital campaign in 2014 prior to the elections.

Can Facebook be used to steal an election?

[h/t: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta]

With nearly 3 billion users, Facebook is by far the largest publisher in the world of news and information. Or rather, mis- and dis-information. During the past year, Crazytown on Facebook has grown exponentially to the point where it has virtually taken over the platform.

One report on Facebook found that 100 pieces of extreme COVID-19 misinformation were shared 1.7 million times and had 117 million views -- way more viewers than the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC combined. Facebook-shared conspiracy theories claimed the pandemic is a hoax, and that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is the mastermind behind a sinister plan to track and control the world's population via a COVID vaccine. The Global Disinformation Index found that Google provided advertising services to 86% of the sites carrying coronavirus conspiracies.

The social media companies, sensitive to criticism, claim that they have taken some steps to blunt the worst excesses of their products. Whether those efforts have been sincere or face-saving, in truth they have not been successful. Especially with many of their human monitors sheltered at home, and their automated AI screeners proving to be inadequate, platform security has become a helpless game of whack-a-mole.

--Raja Mitra