By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Are Google and Facebook the most powerful editors in India? Given that an estimated quarter billion Indians have gone online since the last general election, they just might be.
Whereas the news that people get via television, radio, and print is selected by human editors, on the internet, people increasingly rely on search engines and social media that rely on algorithmic curation. Read in Malayalam
In a new survey of English-language Indian internet users, we find that a third name search engines as their main source of online news, and a quarter name social media — in each case, overwhelmingly, Google and Facebook respectively. Only 18 per cent claimed going directly to the websites or apps of news publishers as their main source of online news.
Strikingly, not only do our respondents rely on search and social media for news, they also say they trust the news that they get there at least as much as news more broadly. For example, 45 per cent say they trust news in search, and 34 per cent news in social media, compared to just over a third who say they trust news overall.
This is strikingly different from what we have seen in other countries, where people often trust news media more than they trust news found via search engines or social media. In a polarised political environment characterised by general skepticism of many established institutions, news found via search can acquire an attractive veneer of technological objectivity, news accessed via social media an appealing aura of authenticity.
Worryingly, many Indians do not seem to understand how the platforms they increasingly rely on for news actually operate. When asked how most of the individual decisions about what news stories to show on Facebook were made, only 26 per cent of our respondents correctly identify the algorithms: The automated systems that rank what people see on social media and make decisions about what to display. Many believe human editors and journalists determine what news they see in their newsfeed.
In a sense, of course, they are right. Even though both Google and Facebook rely on algorithmic curation as they serve news every day to millions of Indians, the stories themselves are often written by professional journalists and, thus, ultimately under the editorial responsibility of the top people at the major news organisations with significant reach online.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a few other major politicians have built significant social media followings that help them circumvent news media and set the agenda, but news media still remains crucial for how most people navigate politics. In this sense, news editors at other major news media are still the most powerful editors in India, and Google and Facebook have not so much supplanted them as supplemented them. As people increasingly rely on search engines and social media for news, the information that reaches them has passed through two sets of gatekeepers: First editors, who decide what to publish, then the algorithms that increasingly shape what we see online.
This is an important change from the single set of gatekeepers that characterise offline media, and means Google and Facebook play an increasingly important and often challenging role in the Indian media environment.
If a company sets out, as Google does, “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, it will confront the fact that the line between information and misinformation can be hard to draw, and that people sometimes actively seek out disinformation. If a company aims to help people “stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them”, as Facebook does, it will have to deal with the fact that not all expression is equally benign, and that people sometimes actively share false and misleading content.
Owning, operating, and profiting from the algorithms that more and more Indians rely on to find news, gives Google and Facebook great power and great responsibilities — like the human editors who came before them. The 2019 elections will be a decisive test of whether they are ready for it.
