US FCC's Move Against BigTech's News Biases Should Prompt Court Challenges In India

The United States (US) Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulator for interstate and international communications through wire, radio, TV, satellite and cable in the US, has dashed off a stiff note to Big Tech that could have a major impact on how content on these platforms is regulated and restrained from bias. 

In a letter dated 13 November addressed to the CEOs of Google (Alphabet), Meta, Apple and Microsoft, Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is Donald Trump’s nominee to head the FCC, has accused them of presiding over a “censorship cartel.” He makes strong allegations against Big Tech, saying they “silenced Americans for doing nothing more than exercising their first amendment rights.” Most of the censorship happened under Joe Biden’s watch.

The FCC move should embolden Indian customers and users of Big Tech platforms to question the algorithms and filtering technologies that decide which content passes muster on social media, and which YouTube user should get a leg up or pulled down for monetisation.

Wikipedia, which is not quite Big Tech, but benefits from being given high rankings in Google's searches, is already facing a court case for defaming an Indian media organisation. It is time for more such Indian challenges to Big Tech and information platforms.

The US ‘censorship cartel,’ which also includes advertising, marketing and ‘fact-check’ firms, is said to have colluded to target core political, religious and scientific speech. In cahoots with so-called media monitors and others, they sought to “defund, demonetise and otherwise put out of business news outlets and organisations that dared to deviate from an approved narrative”.

Carr’s note to Big Tech follows the election of Trump to the White House with a Republican and House majority to boot. His accusation, that Big Tech is part and parcel of a censorship cartel, is backed up by a US House of Representatives staff report titled The Censorship Industrial Complex: How Top Biden White Officials Coerced Big Tech to Censor Americans, True Information and the Critics of the Biden administration (download the full report here).

The work of this complex was backed up by another cartel of advertisers to starve non-conformist news outlets by squeezing their advertising revenues. It makes for chilling reading on the state of free speech in America. The advertisers' cartel branded itself as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (you can download the US House report on GARM from here) when you can interpret the word “responsible” to suit your own political predilections.

The Carr letter to Big Tech CEOs focuses on one particular left-liberal entity called “NewsGuard”, which touts itself as a “neutral” source for rating the credibility of news outlets. NewsGuard — the name itself sounds ominous — generates ratings for news outlets across the web, social media and content platforms, based on allegedly “non-partisan journalistic criteria.” Since we don’t know who these journalists are, one cannot assume that the editors are indeed apolitical and non-partisan. 

Since more and more platforms may be using NewsGuard to rank and filter the content they carry, NewsGuard is effectively capable of censoring news it considers dubious or dangerous. If a website or video channel is not one of the top-ranked sources of news or views according to NewsGuard, its revenues can be squeezed.

The NewsGuard website claims that “our ratings have become the trusted source for understanding media reliability for research institutions, technology platforms, news aggregators, artificial intelligence providers, advertising companies, and news consumers worldwide.” That’s a huge catchment area for effective censorship.

The advisors of NewsGuard seem to share close linkages to the US Deep State. They include former US government officials, including Tom Ridge (former head of Homeland Security), Richard Stengel (former US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs), Michael Hayden (former CIA director), Anders Fogh Rasmussen (former NATO secretary general), and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

A research report by OpIndia, titled Wikipedia’s War on India, details how the platform uses biased information sources to provide a left-liberal perspective on India while blackballing opinions from the other end of the political spectrum.

OpIndia “research paper finds that the structure of Wikipedia itself gives unmitigated power to a handful of individuals who are called ‘administrators.’ There are only 435 active administrators in the entire world who have the power to ban editors, blacklist sources, ban contributors and decide the edits that should be made or reverted on articles. These few administrators hold unbridled power in Wikipedia as far as the content is concerned.” 

A news agency, ANI, found to its chagrin that its Wikipedia page had been negatively edited by the platform. It moved the Delhi High Court to challenge some defamatory references to it on Wikipedia’s pages. Among other things, Wikipedia claimed ANI was “a propaganda tool of the incumbent government.” A few days ago, Wikipedia entered into an agreement with ANI so that the three “users” who may have edited the content can be issued summons. “Users” means those who can edit content. Theoretically, anyone can edit content on Wikipedia, but these are subject to confirmation by higher-ranked administrators.

FCC’s decision to take on Big Tech over NewsGuard ratings, and ANI’s decision to take on Wikipedia, should give us some common-sense pointers and lessons.

First, there is no such thing as a “neutral” journalist or platform. Even a journalist who talks to both sides in an argument can always choose what to emphasise and what not to, tilting the scales in favour of one party or the other in the process. Even NewsGuard, which allegedly is neutral in rating news portals, was found to be tilting towards left-leaning publications. It took NewsGuard several years to downgrade The New York Times, which was always left-liberal, from a perfect score of 100 since 2018 to 87.5 in early 2024. Fox News, of course, comes much lower.

Second, the problem with platforms is that they are protected from libel since they apparently only host third-party content. But platforms are expected by both governments and users to moderate or censor content, and in the process, their actions can have a chilling effect on free speech. Platforms are thus forced to become part-publishers where they can accept, reject, downgrade or upgrade content and content revenues. They use their own judgments, or services like NewsGuard, or fact-checkers to make such decisions, and their algorithms reflect these biases.

Third, news media and academia tend to be dominated by left-liberals in the West (and in India), and since these are the same sources quoted to determine the quality of news or views, judgments made by platforms on what to do with edgy content may be contaminated at source.

Fourth, since biases are hard-coded into algorithms and content-filtering technologies, these algorithms should not be treated as trade secrets that are beyond judicial scrutiny.

Countries can no longer give platforms a free pass on the editorial judgments they make. They should either be declared publishing platforms against whom affected parties can take legal action, or given only limited protection from defamation suits.

The US FCC’s move to hold Big Tech platforms accountable for their biases should prompt India to also keep a close watch on their algorithms. However, India should avoid ham-handed government intervention and act only after a detailed study of their biases.