COVID 19 and IT monsters: New trap, new hunters

-PRAMOD RANJAN

As children, most of us were told the story of the hunter carrying the birds caught in his trap with the birds still chanting in unison: The hunter will come, he will lay a trap, do not get caught in it!

As adults, for years now, we are hearing that the Age of Information is here and that information, and not bombs and tanks, would be the weapons in the next world war. 

We were sure that as we know the story of the hunter and the birds, we would not get caught in the information trap. As for wars, aren’t they fought between nations? Even if information would be the weapon in the future wars, our role, as citizens, would be limited to cheering for our country.

And that was why; we were none the wiser when the information war actually broke out at the global level towards the end of the last decade. Most of us don’t know that we have already became victims of that war. We are like soldiers who have got hit even before they could begin to fight. 

We have a new hunter and a new trap. And the war which is being waged is invisible – unlike the earlier, conventional wars. 

To understand this phenomenon, let us try to make some sense of this war, which is being fought all around us and which has intensified post-COVID 19. And we will make this enquiry with the help of facts available in the public domain.  

Something is wrong somewhere

Millions of people in the world have a feeling that there is something about COVID 19 which is eluding them – something that is amiss. The disease is not as dangerous as it is being made out to be. Or even if it is, long lockdowns are not the best way to control it. People can’t see anyone around them meeting an untimely death only due to Covid. On the other hand, the number of deaths due to lockdown is rising. Many feel that if there was no lockdown, their friends, acquaintances or family members would have been alive.   

Crores of people have been forced to flee the cities. Thousands have died due to hunger and fatigue. Suicides are rising. Compassion and fraternity are disappearing. Lakhs of people have died of non-Covid diseases in the past couple of months. And we know that many of them would have been with us, had hospitals and public transport not been shut due to lockdown. 

In India, reeling under the pernicious caste system, the disease and the lockdown have reversed the direction of the wheels of change, which were set in motion about 100 years back. The cities had emerged as emancipators for the backwards and the Dalits. The cities gave them shelter and protected them from the humiliation that was heaped on them in the villages. The corona war is pushing crores of Dalits-Backwards back into farming when they have almost no arable land to call their own.  

But our sources of information are consistently and in one voice telling us that Covid is the most dangerous ailment humanity has ever faced. Thousands are getting afflicted by it every day and hundreds are dying. We are also being told that nothing except lockdowns can save us from this deadly contagion. To protect ourselves from it, we will have to accept laws and rules which curb our freedom, take away our rights and make us cruel.

There are people in the Third World countries, including India, who, out of habit, view the information being fed to them by their media institutions and the government with suspicion and scepticism. But they are baffled when they find that not only their government but governments all over the globe are saying the same things about the disease and have taken the same kind of steps to deal with it. And when they discover that social media – their favourite source of alternative information, ideas and thoughts – is also parroting the same view, they are left with no option but to abandon their scepticism.    

What is the situation?

The main reason behind this situation is that social media platforms and search engines have severely constricted the freedom of dissent. The rules they have laid down for themselves are such that only information which heightens the fear of Covid is reaching the people. Information which can reduce anxiety and fear or can ensure that fear is proportionate to the actual danger is being blocked. 

The right to dissent, which we commonly call as the right to freedom of expression, is under threat from our very friends whom we consider as the protectors, patrons and flag-bearers of this freedom. 

These friends are known as GAFA – an abbreviation made up of the first letters of four words – Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. This word was first used in France to symbolize the power of and the danger from these American mammoths. Later, some other mega companies like Microsoft and Twitter joined the elite club of enterprises which control information in our world. Though they are known as tech giants or big tech i.e. IT biggies, the word ‘monster’ would describe them more appropriately. According to a rough calculation, at least 95 per cent of the information channels in the world are controlled by these monsters (Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter). 

These IT monsters owe their existence to something called algorithm, which, in turn, has given birth to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Using algorithms, these companies have developed their social media platforms and search engines in such a way that all the users are confined to their respective echo-chambers. These echo-chambers feel like a vast, open space where information flows free and unhindered. But in reality, they only echo the thoughts and beliefs of the users and of the others whose thoughts and beliefs match theirs. A slew of barriers prevent other voices from reaching these chambers. And it is equally difficult to get your voice heard outside these chambers.    

That is why; these chambers have played a key role in turning the religious into fundamentalist and those fighting for freedom from caste into rabid casteists. 

While developing the algorithms for these echo chambers, the companies take care to cater to the basic instincts and primitive psychology of human beings. Only such information reaches the users which their conscious or unconscious mind wants to hear. Fear, lust and hatred are primitive instincts which every human being possesses and appealing to them never goes waste. 

That was why, when, in February-March this year, predictions on the probable number of deaths due to Covid 19, based on statistical probability models, began circulating on social media and thanks to algorithms, search engines began throwing up grim figures, the middle class, which is the biggest user of Internet, got fear-stricken.  

However, this was not as straight as it seems to be. The fact is that the mega corporations had altered their algorithms making it very difficult to access alternative opinions about covid 19. If any doctor, specialist, politician or social activist expresses an opinion on Covid 19 which does not match the view of the World Health Organization (WHO), it is either removed from social media platforms or reach to it is automatically restricted.  

What the tech monsters are doing should be seen in light of their unholy nexus with mega corporations engaged in manufacturing medicines and vaccines. Like tech giants, the group of these pharma majors is known as ‘Big Pharma’. 

Reports say that the tech monsters are the biggest beneficiaries of the global lockdown. The world’s economy may be going downhill but the shares of these companies are touching new heights and their total assets are growing by leaps and bounds. In the coming days, the world will become increasingly dependent on various platforms of the tech monsters and that would enable them to tighten their hold on global politics and economy. That is why; well-known economist Jason Furman, who was also economic adviser to former US President Barrack Obama, has underlined the urgent need for reining these companies in. He believes that the coronavirus scare would reduce pressure on these companies and they would dominate economies.

Big Pharma, engaged in developing vaccine for Covid 19, is the second biggest beneficiary of the irrational and disproportionate fear of the disease. Journalist and writer of Pharma:Greed, Lies and the Poisoning of America Gerald Posner says, “Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity. The global crisis will potentially be a blockbuster for the industry in terms of sales and profits. The worse the pandemic gets, the higher their eventual profit.” 

However, even after taking all these facts into consideration the question remains that who are the other members of this alliance, which has declared war on the poor of the world. Are the tech monsters playing this game on their own behalf or are they the pawns of some other power? Why the governments of different countries, including India, have become the fifth column of these players? 

I will try to give detailed answers to some of these questions in my forthcoming articles on the age of corona. Through another article I will try to reveal how the interests of GAFA coincide with those of the pharma and vaccine businesses and how, over the past four-five years, GAFA has developed an insane interest in these businesses. 

Be that as it may, in this piece we will see how news that seeks to reduce the fear of corona or questions the view that the spread of the virus would lead to a catastrophe is being censored and also how credible is the WHO, which is fuelling global fear and anxiety.

Google search and YouTube

Most of the people in the world use Google search engine for locating information on the Internet. Google’s share in the global search engine market is 91.89 per cent while in India, 98.5 per cent people use Google search engine.  

Due to its search engine and its products like YouTube, Google is much more powerful than social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 

As soon as the lockdown began, using algorithms and artificial intelligence, Google began blocking and tagging as ‘false news’ any information or material related to coronavirus which it considered misleading. It becomes impossible to reach to the people any material identified as false news by Google as the search engine pushes it lower down in the search results.  

Google has even extended this censorship to its Playstore with the result that many apps related to Covid 19 issued by different countries and key organizations have got blocked. YouTube, which is sister concern of Google, also did the same. It started removing the videos that contradicted the statements or views of the WHO.  

YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki told an interviewer that YouTube would remove the videos on Covid 19 that give information which is ‘problematic’…“anything that is medically unsubstantiated like people saying take vitamin C; take turmeric, we’ll cure you….Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”

Thus, YouTube has forced its audience to consider the opinion of a controversial body like the WHO as gospel truth. As YouTube is the favoured broadcasting platform of many leading TV news channels so they also began refraining from presenting any view which went against the stand of the WHO. Fox News and several other independent media organizations, criticizing this policy of YouTube said that it had made the WHO its gospel. 

Twitter and Facebook

Using machine learning and automation, Twitter removed the tweets that went against ‘official’ facts. One such video-tweet was uploaded by Indian politician and actor Rajnikanth, in which he supported the Prime Minister’s call for a 14-hour-long Janata curfew. “To prevent community transmission, the virus needs to be curbed totally for 12 to 14 hours,” he said in the video. Twitter’s artificial intelligence considered his statement unscientific because according to WHO guidelines, social distancing for 14 hours is not enough for protection from the virus.

In a blog post, Twitter itself has admitted that six days before WHO named the disease caused by coronavirus as Covid 19 (that was in January), it had begun making changes in its system “to ensure that when you come to the service for information about COVID-19, you are met with credible, authoritative content (supplied by the WHO) at the top of search.” 

Facebook owns three biggest social media platforms in the world (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram). Of them, two – Facebook and WhatsApp – have the highest number of users in India. Around 28 crore persons use Facebook in India and around 40 crore use WhatsApp. 

Facebook is using artificial intelligence, algorithms and a team of hundreds of humans for fact-checking the information about coronavirus put up on its platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) and has decided to shorten and remove posts which sought to question the massive scare about this disease or argued that its lethality should be viewed in the context of other contagious and non-contagious diseases which claim crores of lives every year. It also decided to even remove accounts spreading ‘misinformation’. 

These included accounts of persons who either did not consider the virus as a very big threat or believed that the kit used for its detection was unscientific or were in favour of using alternative means for combating the disease. There were many who questioned the very existence of the virus and linked it with the vaccine business of Big Pharma and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There were reports of vandalism and some places and the deaths of some persons due to these posts.

Artificial intelligence and algorithm were used to delete crores of such posts. Of course, some racial comments were also deleted but it was not always possible for artificial intelligence to detect posts with racial overtones. Hence, a majority of the posts, tweets and videos deleted were those which went against the view taken by the WHO. 

In this process, the posts and videos put up by London journalist David Icke, California’s Dr Rashid A. Battar, India’s naturopathy enthusiast Dr Vishwaroop Chaudhary and Dr Shiva, a Dalit doctor of Indian origin living in the USA were deleted from Facebook and other platforms. Others who met a similar fate were doctors of Covid centres, medical specialists and well-known social workers. They all were stigmatized by describing them as ‘conspiracy theorists’.

Facebook’s CEO and American billionaire Sheryl Kara Sandberg even went to the extent of saying that if needed, posts by politicians, celebrities and even posts in private groups would be deleted. This is the same Sheryl whose name had come up in connection with the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. It was alleged that she used the power of Facebook to influence elections in the US. Sheryl is not known for her social concerns. She is known for her insistence on financial gains at any cost. She is also closely related to the health business. Before joining Facebook, she had worked in India  on World Bank projects for elimination of leprosy, blindness and AIDS. Facebook, Twitter and Google even deleted comments by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and US President Donald Trump in which the two leaders had tried to rationalize the fear over cornona. Their comments were deemed as ‘misinformation’. Earlier, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms avoided deleting comments by top politicians. 

In one of his speeches, Bolsonaro said that anti-malarial drug Hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for Covid 19. His speech was published on his social media accounts. Many specialists had also claimed that Hydroxychloroquine could be useful in treating Covid 19. Sometime back, America had demanded this drug from India. But let alone Hydroxychloroquine, any post that sought to offer any alternatives to vaccine and lockdown for battling the disease, was either pulled down or the reach to it was blocked. 

These platforms also used machine learning to warn users accessing posts that raised questions on corona virus, on lockdown, on WHO and on guidelines issued by different government. According to Facebook’s own data, 95 per cent users did not read the posts concerned after seeing the warning.

After facing criticism on this count, Facebook appointed a Global Oversight Board. To be financed by Facebook, this Board will supposedly be independent of the financial interests of Facebook. This will be the ‘supreme court’ for people who have objections to their content being removed from Facebook and Instagram. The decision of this court will be final. 

WHO, Big Pharma and GAFA

The WHO, which was established as an agency of the United Nations on 7 April 1948 has been courting controversies for the past couple of years. It is charged with working under the pressure of pharmaceutical companies, vaccine manufacturers and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The current director general of WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is a former Health Minister of Ethiopia. Dr Tedros is seen as a communist who ‘possesses the talent to work with anyone’. That he has a soft corner for China is well-known. Donald Trump has announced that the US would stop funding WHO. 

Ever since Covid 19 was named as such, Dr Tedros has been laying stress on two things – test and solidarity. In all press briefings related to Covid 19, he repeats both these words thrice –“test, test, test, solidarity, solidarity, solidarity”. 

His emphasis on running tests on the healthy rather than treating the sick is bound to be questioned in the future. He himself has said that 80 per cent patients of this disease would be asymptomatic and those who are symptomatic will get cured by themselves in 12-14 days.  Then why so much emphasis is laid to conduct so many tests? Dr Tedros himself knows that seven billion people of the world cannot be tested. Then, what would random testing yield except fear? At the time of writing of this article, tests were continuing even when an overwhelming majority of specialists say that the test kit being used is prone to returning false positive results. 

Recently, there were reports of goat and papaya getting infected with coronavirus. Tanzanian President John Pagufuli is a PhD in chemistry. Like the leaders of many other nations, he did not impose strict lockdown in his country. He was surprised when the number of corona patients in Tanzania jumped from 20 to 480 in one month. He took some samples from fruits, vegetables and animals and sent them for test with names of imaginary persons. After the goat and the papaya tested positive, he sacked the head of the country’s national health laboratory. There are reports that he has given the WHO marching orders from his country. 

Not only unnecessary testing, the WHO guidelines on compiling figures of Covid 19 deaths are also designed to whip up hysteria. Based on these guidelines, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) has issued new directives for compilation of deaths due to Covid.    

The directives say that deaths due to cardiac injury, clotting in the bloodstream, pneumonia etc should also be treated as Covid 19 deaths, irrespective of whether the patient was tested and even if the report was negative.

The ICMR has directed all hospitals, health centres and doctors that in cases where it is doubtful whether a deceased patient was suffering from Covid 19, the death should be recorded as ‘possibly due to Covid 19’ if the patient had symptoms like cough and fever. 

It has also been directed that if a patient dies before the receipt of his corona test report, it should be registered as ‘suspected covid 19 death’. Not only that, if a patient’s test report is negative but he had symptoms of Covid 19, it should be recorded as ‘probable Covid death’ on the basis of clinical-epidemiological diagnosis. Now, clinical-epidemiological diagnosis is largely guess work, which has been severely criticized by specialists. Thus, the Covid death figures that are being bandied about us are quite inflated.    

It would, however, be wrong to presume that everything was hunky-dory at WHO before Dr Trendos took over the top position. UN member nations had started slashing grants to WHO and other global bodies after the 2008 recession. For the past several years, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and organisations allied to it such as Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunization (GAVI) have been the biggest funders of WHO. Their contribution is much higher than that of any member nation. Earlier, America was WHO’s biggest funder, followed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Britain. With the US stopping its funding, the Foundation has become WHO’s biggest benefactor. Thus, WHO is no longer accountable to United Nations or to its
member nations.   

WHO declared Covid 19 a global pandemic on 11 March. Two days later, for the first time in its history, the world body started accepting contributions from non-member organizations to build, what was called Covid 19 Solidarity Response Fund. It was decided to secure 675 million US dollars for the fund. Now, any individual, corporation, foundation or any other body can give money to WHO. And they include such companies and organizations in the health business, which are solely interested in profit.  

Facebook and Google are making huge contributions to this fund. 

This is not the first time WHO is playing with the health of the people of the Third World countries. There are many books, reports and researches that show how the WHO, acting under the pressure of pharma companies, has made poor nations waste huge amounts of money.

The WHO is also known for unnecessarily pressing the panic button. In 2005 it was claimed that the H1N1 Flu would kill between 50 lakh and 1.5 crore people all over the world. But the actual number of deaths due to the disease was less than 500. Similarly, in 2009, the WHO had declared swine flu a pandemic. Later, it came to the fore that it was no more dangerous than ordinary flu. This drew considerable flak for the WHO and for years later, newspapers and social media speculated that the pressing of the panic button was not due to bona-fide failure in making correct assessment but was done under the pressure of the vaccine lobby.

Some dates can help us understand this issue better vis-a-vis Covid 19. The WHO has received information about pneumonia spreading in China due to some unknown reasons on 30 December 2019. A month later, on 30 January 2020, it announced a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ and on 11 March, it declared Covid 19 a pandemic. This caused a sensation in the world. 

Answering a question at a press conference, WHO’s Executive Director Michael J. Ryan said that no specific procedure was followed for declaring Covid 19 as pandemic. He said no procedure was prescribed for the purpose. However, there were enough hints in the speech of Dr Tedros at Munich Security Conference on 15 February – that is about a month earlier – that the WHO was planning to designate Covid 19 as a pandemic.    

Dr Tedros, in his address, said, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous. That’s why we’re also working with search and media companies like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Tencent, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and others to counter the spread of rumours and misinformation. We call on all governments, companies and news organizations to work with us to sound the appropriate level of alarm, without fanning the flames of hysteria.”

Coordinated attack on diversity of opinions 

It is clear from the speech that even before Covid was declared pandemic by the WHO, GAFA was working in this direction. That was why; as soon as Covid was declared a pandemic, tech giants (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube) issued a joint statement on 17 March asserting that in the interest of global public health, they would not give any place to fake news, misinformation and opinions against vaccine on their platforms”. 

This joint statement was unprecedented in view of the fact that these companies are old rivals. After this, Google, Twitter and Facebook made separate arrangements for fact-checking of so-called ‘misleading information’ and started blocking the accounts of specialists and social workers who did not agree with a particular view. 

These companies, who boast that they bring people of the world  together and are flag-bearers of the right to dissent, also made full use of an EU advisory which said that they should prevent dissemination of misleading information from their platforms.

These companies have signed contracts with several organizations for fact-check. One of them is Politifact. It has received grants from, among others, Facebook and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over the past couple of years.

This organization fact-checks material floating on the Internet and labels them as ‘false’, ‘mostly false’, ‘liar, liar pants on fire’, ‘true’, ‘mostly true’ etc. 

A cursory glance over the information / news chosen by this organization for fact-check and the tags put on them by it on them would reveal how it even divides political opinion into slots of true and false.  

Person/organization/content	Opinion/thought	Politifact label
Jeff Shipley, people’s representative 28 April, 2020	“Young people have a greater chance of being killed by the HPV vaccine than COVID-19.”	“Liar, liar, pants on fire!”
American President Donald Trump5 May, 2020	“Models projecting COVID-19 deaths are talking about without mitigation.”	False
Cindy O’Laughlin, Missouri state Senator22 March, 2020	“I see no time in the history of this country when perfectly healthy people have been basically confined to their homes or only able to do essential things”	False
A Facebook post, 26 April 2020	“Covid 19 will always be a part of our world. We need to prepare to deal with this long-term relationship”.	Mostly true
A Facebook Post	“CDC has proposed voting through email. Thus, this narrative of epidemic has been created for elections”	Mostly false
Blogs and TikTok	“More have died of the unemployment created by coronavirus than by the virus itself”	False
A Facebook Post19 April, 2020	“Sweden is not under lockdown. But it is much better-off than its neighbours Denmark and Norway, which have imposed lockdown.”	Mostly false
Facebook post	“Gates Foundation wants to earn 31.5 billion dollars through the vaccine being developed in UK”	False
Mike Turzai, Speaker, Pennsylvania House of Representatives in a video   9 May, 2020	“It seems children face no threat from this disease unless they are already suffering from some dangerous ailment”	False
Tucker Carlson, journalist, analyst and editor of Caller.com  27 April, 2020	“(Corona) virus is not as dangerous as we had thought”	False
Post by Lincoln Project associated with Republican Party 5 May 2020	“Trump bailed out Wall Street, but not Main Street.”	False
Facebook post 22 April 2020	“During the 1918 flu pandemic, San Francisco residents formed the Anti-Mask League. San Francisco was ultimately one of the cities that suffered the most.”	Mostly true

The outcome

Thus, not only did criticism of WHO’s unscientific policies on these platforms ceased completely but the traditional wisdom and the creativity of the 7.5 billion people of the world to work out a way of coming out from this calamity was sacrificed on the altar of so-called specialization. As I said earlier, this is neither fully spontaneous nor fully pre-planned. However, it is definitely a dangerous signal of technology’s triumph over man. And greedy and whimsical tech organizations are taking full advantage of it.

Artificial intelligence and statistical modelling have pushed us into a dark alley. Humanity would take ages to emerge out of it. And the way out is to prioritize human judgment and common sense over insensitive and rash big capital and begin banking on presentation of comparative facts over statistical probability models. 

(Pramod Ranjan’s interests lie in subaltern studies and modernity. Sahityetihas Ka Bahujan Paksha, Bahujan Sahitya Ki Prastavna and Mahishasur: Mithak Evam Paramparayein are among the main books  edited by him while Shimla Diary is penned by him. Currently, Ranjan is a professor in Rabindranath Tagore School of Languages and Cultural Studies of Assam University. 

{Contact: ±919811884495, janvikalp@gmail.com})