Our algorithm-driven reality – Pakistan

PAKISTAN’S National Assembly ignored all objections and protestations by the opposition, digital rights activists and journalists to hurriedly push through the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act this week in an attempt to police social media platforms that the hybrid government has struggled to muzzle.

The question, however, is whether Pakistan is unique in its attempts to come to grips with social media. The answer is an emphatic no as is clear from examples of the US, India and China where social media has posed challenges of varying degrees and kinds.

Ever since the ouster of Imran Khan as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence in April 2022, after he fell out with the military leadership, the latter and its civilian acolytes in the PML-N and PPP have struggled to tame social media platforms dominated by their political rival.

Despite considerable effort, both legal and extrajudicial, including forced disappearances and arrests of social media activists belonging to Imran Khan’s PTI, the attempts of the regime to bring social media under control, where the latter party enjoys unrivalled superiority, have been frustrated.

Pakistan has justified its measures to put social media platforms on a leash, saying they are destabilising the gains ostensibly made by the economy under the hybrid system in place since 2022. The truth is that, more than anything else, these measures are placing roadblocks in a high-growth sector. How so?

The question is whether Pakistan is unique in its attempts to come to grips with social media.

Whether it is the firewall that slows down the internet or curbs on certain platforms or other measures, software exporters say that these are adversely affecting their business and also depriving individuals offering their services abroad of an opportunity to earn badly needed foreign exchange for the country.

India’s exports are largely driven by the services sector, namely IT; experts say the country’s huge foreign exchange surplus owes itself to these exports. And here we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater as we are bereft of ideas on how to ‘control’ anti-government content on social media.

However, Pakistan isn’t alone in trying to curb free data and information flows (admittedly these also include falsehoods and propaganda). Take, for example, the current tension in the US between TikTok and the authorities, where President Donald Trump has given the platform a three-month reprieve after it was banned.

While officially, the concern regarding TikTok is about a ‘Chinese-controlled’ firm harvesting US user date to develop algorithms and others digital weapons that could be used in an information or propaganda war with the US, there are other, more potent issues as well.

Israel’s Gaza genocide is one. Where US-owned (and controlled) social media platforms such as Facebook are said to have used algorithms to block content showing events in their entirety, X and even Meta’s Instagram were more cunning.

In the words of one social media user, X’s Elon Musk has repeatedly talked of his commitment to ‘free speech’, but has made no such promise to ensure ‘free reach’. The devil is in this detail. While most of us were free to post almost any information/ opinion on Gaza, critics say the platform algorithms kicked in to give greater reach to pro-Gaza genocide posts.

Ever since Musk took over Twitter and rechristened it X, many accounts, which were adding a certain number of followers every month, have stopped growing as has their reach. My own ‘followers’ count has not grown for months now, neither has my reach or views. I can only attribute it to the gulf between my worldview and the one promoted by Musk’s algorithms.

TikTok was a thorn in the side of the apartheid state’s supporters and hence the need to ban it. Now there are indications from no less than the US president himself that he’d want an American entrepreneur to purchase the app. This to dictate and direct content/ information flows in future conflicts, including in Gaza in case the peace deal collapses. With the bulk of traditional media already onside, US free speech advocates have remained largely silent over this ‘algorithm-controlled’ freedom.

China is at least not hypocritical and does not lecture the world on the virtues of freedom. It firewalls all content that it does not like. It is an authoritarian state which has decided to focus on economic development, while leaving political rights for another day.

Beijing has lifted over 800 million people out of poverty over the past 40 years. The World Bank said in a report in April 2022: “With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty.”

Again, this by no means is an endorsement of China’s two-track policy whereby economic well-being comes against the backdrop of few or no political rights. Ironically, while the world has issues with this policy in China, it embraces despots in the Arab world doing exactly the same because they toe Washington’s line on global and regional politics.

India, where the space for non-Hindutva politics and thoughts may be dramatically shrinking under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is a different story. Those in power have the bulk of the traditional media in their pocket and a handful of BJP politicians and oligarchs such as Ambani and Adani are calling the shots.

The size of the India market endows the country with enormous power. It has applied pressure on all social media platforms to sign up to tight regulations, obliging them to moderate (read: censor) content that the government finds unsavoury. The revenues the tech companies earn from India makes them weak-kneed when faced with government pressure.

In a fluid, ever-evolving situation, it is difficult to predict or even visualise the exact shape of things to come. One hopes this fascinating and challenging scenario does not lead to a world where we smugly celebrate ‘access to free information’ and forget how algorithm-tainted it may well be.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2025