American Big Tech could do a “Hunter Biden” in Indian General Elections

We have often seen booth capturing, ballot looting, and voter suppression incidents in various elections. Politicians, through professional criminals, use these electoral frauds to manipulate the outcomes of elections. In the modern digital world, where everything from crimes to business has been digitized, it seems the methods of electoral fraud have also changed. Now, the whole criminal system has been outsourced to some global technology companies.

In recent times, the incidents of election manipulation have reached a mass level. Big tech companies, using their virtual global presence and information base, have become critical players in election fraud. Although, sometimes users themselves use their platforms to manipulate the data but most of the time it is the big companies who are involved in the election manipulation.

Facebook Actively Participated In Election Manipulation

In an exclusive podcast interview with host Joe Rogan, Facebook Chief Executive Officer and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has accepted the active participation and censoring of a story about US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, during the US presidential elections in 2020. In the podcast, Zukerberg confessed about the suppression of an email leak story from laptop of Hunter Biden, which was published in the New York Post.

The leaked story claimed that the abandoned laptop of Hunter Biden had details of him using his father, the then vice president, Joe Biden’s influence to seal a deal with a Ukrainian businessman. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani also claimed that the hard drive of the laptop contained footage of Hunter Biden doing drugs and underage pornographic content.

Zuckerberg confessed that Facebook engineers manually downgraded the reports on the site’s ranking and news feed feature. It was done so that the story reaches a very small and limited audience.

Justifying the manipulation of information, he said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation reached out to Facebook at that time. They warned about a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 elections. Thus, Facebook decided to limit the news’ reach.

Further explaining the procedure of limiting the news story he said, “our protocol is different from Twitter..if something is reported to us as potential misinformation, we also run third-party fact-checking programs because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false”.

Zuckerberg added, “I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution of Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.”

Impact of Election Manipulation

It is pertinent to understand that manual information manipulation is a big threat to democracy. During the US 2020 presidential election, if Biden’s fraud could reach the public at large then the result could have been different. Republican candidate Donald Trump had a fair chance of defeating Democrat Joe Biden.

The difference in the votes was merely 4 per cent between Biden and Trump. It was possible that if people had known about Biden’s fraud then they could have changed their minds and voted for Trump.

Also Read: Manmohan is overrated, Joe Biden is the real robot

Big Tech Can Manipulate Indian General Elections

Last year, dismissing Facebook India’s plea of challenging the summons issued by the Delhi Assembly, Supreme Court in its 188-page judgment expressly stated that social media manipulation and digital platforms can be imminently uncontrollable endangering the foundation of democracy.

Although technology does not possess any emotions but people behind these businesses do have interests. They carry their own bias towards an ideology. Monetary quid-pro-quo also has value. There are multiple instances in the past where social media companies have manually sidelined the voice of a particular section of society that does not carry their ideals.

An informed voter decides the health of a democracy. Unbiased information dissemination helps a voter to elect a candidate that is best for his constituency or country. But, in the digital age, where social media has become the prime source of information dissemination, if voters are manually served manipulated data then the degeneration of the electoral democracy is certain.

Recently exposing Twitter’s left-leaning information manipulation, Twitter Senior Engineer had said that Twitter does not believe in free speech and employees there are fu***ng communists. He further said, “..everyone on the right wing will be like, ‘bro, it’s okay to stay, just gotta tolerate it. The left will be like, no, I’m not gonna tolerate it. I need it censored or else I’m not gonna be on the platform. So, it does that on the right. It’s true. There is bias. It is what it is today.”

Consequently, it is very important to constantly check the election manipulation methods of American BigTech companies. Free and fair election is the hallmark of Indian democracy. Any electoral fraud or information manipulation may lead to a total system collapse.

George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, once said, “politics is the last resort for the scoundrel.” Here the BigTech American companies are the scoundrels who possess much more power than any small town criminals. They have unlimited resources, information, power, and a virtual presence.

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