Twitter permanently suspended the personal account of President of the United States of America due to the risk of incitement of violence. Facebook, Instagram has already suspended accounts of President Donald Trump. Google, Apple has also followed the suit and taken down the Parler app from their respective app stores. The question of these tech giants acting in a unilateral biased manner is not even a question. Here is one more example in the Indian context:

This metric shows that the search website (mostly Google) actively promotes left-leaning websites such as theprint, wire, Qunit, The Hindu in its search results compared to nationalist voices such as opindia, swarajya or even kreately now whose only 23% of the traffic comes from web searches. It’s very likely that even the AI algorithms of these tech giants have inherent political biases.

This problem is very grave and it’s way more serious than you can imagine. The concern of our young parliamentarian Tejasvi Surya ji is well justified. In fact, Rajiv Malhotra ji has written a new well-researched book on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: Buy Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds Book Online at Low Prices in India | Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power: 5 Battlegrounds Reviews & Ratings – Amazon.in

So how to tackle these tech giants the Indian way? Remember how we handled the Chinese apps? Indian Apps Capture 40 Per Cent Market Share Of TikTok Since Govt Banned The Chinese App: Report (swarajyamag.com)

India is not the US. The Indian state has way more powers and it can theoretically ban these tech giants in one go if it wanted to. This threat of losing a market of over a billion users is a threat these tech giants cannot ignore. The Indian government has to realise their position of strength. The question is what to do with this position of strength? The first few steps seem obvious to me. For all the advancements in the AI and algorithms, these tech giants still rely on manual human moderators to moderate contents on their platforms. Yes, they have algorithms to check for their policy violations and their algorithms are politically biased as well. However, these tech giants can be and should be forced to reveal the moderators of their platforms. These moderators on these platforms should be appointed by a parliamentary committee and assisted by a specialist organisation say NITI Aayog. The algorithms employed by these companies to filter out speech should be forced to be made public. The point is, our parliament and bureaucrats/technocrats have to start interfering and bullying these tech giants be it Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon or Microsoft (but only for national interest and not personal vendetta as in the case of IPS Roopa against True Indology). The classic example, in this case, is our arch-enemy China. China has bullied these tech giants to serve its own insidious purposes. Many of China’s famous face tracking AI technologies were found to be supplied by these American giants. Chinese police are using facial recognition sunglasses to track citizens – The Verge
These tech giants are all for profits and power. Power is something we cannot yield under any circumstances. Does not matter if Sundar Pichai heads Google or Indian American employees dominate these companies. Our government has to bully them into submission.

The long term solution that many people talk about is creating alternative platforms. That is not easy. For that, you need long term vision, huge investments and incentives for people to switch platforms. Even after so much anti-China sentiments, users did not switch from Tik Tok until the government banned it completely. To develop alternatives, government, leaders, entrepreneurs, technocrats, billionaires and common Indians will all have to come and work together. Our policymakers will need all the help they can get. They should actively seek help from people like Rajiv Malhotra and many smart nationalist Indians many of whom are actually working for these tech giants. Our bureaucrats and politicians should actively and humbly seek advice and act on it with purpose else some woke leftist moderator would be flagging tweets of Narendra Modi for fake news in the coming future and it will be too late to even act upon as we are seeing in the case of President Trump. The Chinese already have an unprecedented one-sided edge over India in driving narratives. It’s high time Indians, especially the Hindutva, pro-India voices wake up and smell the coffee. It’s time to act and act smart with purpose.

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