Cyber warfare a poll threat

The word cyber warfare with regard to elections needs to be explained. The fact of the matter is that technology today through social media has the power to disrupt and influence elections. For instance, Twitter bots, which are software programs that sends out automated posts on Twitter; or people who behave like bots by constantly liking and retweeting information in a bid to manipulate discourse on key issues; have the potential to affect governance and governments especially during election time. India would be especially vulnerable in this regard as the country hosts many elections at the panchayat, state and national level and the Election Commission (EC) should be especially worried if Russia, China or the US, unleash their bots in order to bring about a government that unduly favours their interests, especially with regard to weapon sales.

Countries are doing their best to deal with this menace. In March this year, the European Commission set out a new rule for social media platforms, which orders them to take down ‘illegal content’ within an hour of it being reported. It’s not just the EC, member countries too have been getting involved. Last year, the UK put the squeeze on tech giants and ordered that online extremist content be removed within two hours — currently the average is 36. In Germany, the case is more stringent. After receiving complaints, social media websites have to remove hate speech within 24 hours. This goes up to a week where the evaluation of content is more difficult. Fines of up to  €50 million can be applied for non-compliance.

In the case of India, we too should aim to follow the European Commission’s one-hour rule. Such a rule can be placed under the IT Act, 2000. For the sake of practicality, one can ensure that that it is initially only applicable to election states and riot affected places. As for what ‘manipulative’ content is, my argument would be — what remains illegal offline should remain illegal online. So manipulating elections through whipping up emotions, through hate speech or defamation, which is illegal offline, should be illegal online as well.

Such regulations need to be implemented quickly as increasingly social media is becoming a communication channel for candidates, especially during election campaigns. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are enabling candidates to directly reach out to voters, mobilise supporters, and influence the public agenda. Recently, Twitter admitted that more than 50,000 Russia-linked accounts used its service to post automated material about the 2016 US election and Facebook has estimated that as many as 126 million Americans had been exposed to Russian-backed material on its platform during the 2016 election campaign for this purpose. It’s not just the US. Twitter bots were used to advance Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s nationalistic agenda in the election of 2014.

But while election campaigning on social media is fast increasing, the problem remains that research on cross-media research is limited in several regards. First, most studies focus only on one platform, overwhelmingly Twitter and less on Facebook or WhatsApp. Second, only a fraction of this work concentrates on communication going beyond meta data like digital traces left by communication artifacts like @messages, retweets, likes, or hashtags. Third, such research must also take into account that on Twitter, most user accounts are publicly visible and accessible even for non-registered audiences and thus retweets often diffuse political information beyond the direct follower network. For instance, journalists use Twitter as an ‘index of public opinion’, which implies that targeted campaign messages on Twitter have the potential to create spillover effects to other media. This is another reason why the one-hour rule is crucial for India. In contrast, most accounts on Facebook are private and its usage is based on one-way or reciprocal friendship ties. Thus, the audience for Facebook posts mostly consists of people already ‘liking’ a candidate page.

But while Twitter and Facebook are threats, the real concern for authorities safeguarding the impartiality of Indian elections is WhatsApp. Having a strong reach, especially in rural India, it is safe to say that 2019 will be the ‘WhatsApp election’ in India, as its access and engagement time is far more than other social media platforms. For political strategists, the challenge with WhatsApp is that there are no Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) that they can use for analysis because its communication is encrypted. On the other side, the huge problem staring at election officials is regulating ‘hate speech’ or ‘rumours’ on this medium as it is almost impossible to find the person who started them first. The only solution is that the EC should deal with WhatsApp by selectively banning it in election states with the help of Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Make no mistake, elections both in India and around the world face a huge threat from cyber armies. Bots and their ‘relatives’ — namely botnets, bot armies, sockpuppets, fake accounts, sybils, and automated trolls — are a dominant new force which will increasingly govern public discourse and can influence elections. Similarly, it is now increasingly possible to create audio and video clips of entirely fake events. For instance, it will soon become entirely possible to create a believable fake video of a candidate speaking. This will be even tougher on an electorate who already have trouble recognising relatively ‘naive text bots’, who masquerade as real users. Such advances in social media will allow foreign states or terrorists even more powers to manipulate the public and influence elections unless tough measures are taken soon.

The writer is an eminent international cyber lawyer and cyber thought leader. Views are personal.