Bytedance, the world's "most valuable startup," is fueling religious violence in India

An edited version of this article was originally published on Technode.com. Below is the original, unedited version.

In what is becoming an unfortunately common occurrence, yet another Bytedance app is receiving criticism for its problematic content overseas.

This time, the platform in question is Helo, the Beijing-based super-unicorn’s news app for Indian regional languages. A recent investigation by the Hindustan Times has revealed that Helo, as well their Xiaomi-backed, India-based competitor ShareChat, are “rife with misinformation and political propaganda.”

The article cited a number of Helo posts, including one saying that the BBC had declared the prominent Indian National Congress the “fourth most corrupt political party in the world” (they didn’t), and another that falsely claimed a well-known politician in the state of Rajasthan had suggested that India should help neighboring rival Pakistan clear its debt rather than invest in the country’s newly-constructed Statue of Unity monument (he didn’t). At the time of writing, neither had been removed from the Helo platform.

According to the Times investigation, fake news on both Helo and ShareChat tended to involve false quotes or graphic images designed to provoke outrage along religious lines, manipulating the country’s longstanding tensions between its Hindu and Muslim populations. Many either referenced or involved images of violent acts.

While I personally am unable to read any local Indian languages, I enlisted the assistance of some acquaintances who could. While incendiary content could be found in many different languages on the platform, the bulk of the fake news was in Hindi, the language of much of India’s Hindu majority, and spoken by controversial Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi has used a brand of populist Hindu nationalism to fuel his rise to power.  

In just a few minutes of browsing the Helo app, a number of problematic posts were found. Examples of fake and harmful Hindi content include this, which falsely claims that US president Donald Trump had advocated for Modi to become “Prime Minister for life:” 

"Statement by American President: 'Narendra Modi should be made Prime Minister for life'"

Or this one, which accuses the country’s Muslim minority of being the culprits behind the bulk of the country’s rapes, and claims that members of Modi’s rival politicians place blame on Hindus:

"Over the past ten years in India, 40,000 rapes have been committed. Of these Muslims have committed 39000. Even then, the Congress Party claims Hindus are rapists and terrorists. Shame on them."

This photo, which was trending under the hashtag 'Temple-Mosque debate’ falsely quotes an opposition leader promising to reverse a court decision allowing the construction of a Hindu 'Ram temple.' This is a hot-button issue in India, as Hindu-Muslim tensions are fanned by local politicians promising to build a temple over an existing mosque:

"Kapil Sibal: If the Supreme Court decides in favour of the Ram Temple, the Congress Party comes to power in 2019, we will pass an ordinance to reverse the court’s decision."

A “lit match in a tinder box” for social and political instability

Many of these posts become even more dangerous when they become shared over messaging apps like WhatsApp, the messaging app that is most popular in India. Helo encourages the sharing of its content via WhatsApp, by featuring an option to do so through a WhatsApp logo button in the lower left-hand corner of the post:

Earlier this year, twenty people were killed in religious and ethnically-motivated mob violence, based on erroneous assumptions drawn from fake news stories, shared via WhatsApp. As a well-known Silicon Valley-based messenger app, WhatsApp has drawn much of the blame from international media for spreading misinformation and fueling the violence. However, it should be noted that WhatsApp is just a fairly bare-bones messaging app. It does not employ algorithms which are biased towards one form of content over another.

This, however, is not the case for Helo and Bytedance’s other content recommendation apps. In fact, what has made Bytedance’s apps successful is that they promote the headlines and content that is most likely to receive the most engagement from users. That content is often that which confirm peoples’ worst biases and play to their deepest fears and resentments. WhatsApp is a neutral medium, but Bytedance’s apps favor outrage, even when that outrage may be unjustified, and leads to violence. 

The arrival of “clickbait” news apps x India’s turbulent election season = Trouble

The fake news frenzy comes as India’s political environment intensifies in the run-up to elections in the first half of next year. While fake news shared on social media platforms famously disrupted the 2016 US elections, its impact could perhaps be even more pronounced in the world’s second-most-populous country, and largest democracy. 

With approximately 10 million Indians getting online for the first time each month, the internet is rapidly transforming political and social life in the country. This, however, carries with it very real threats to stability. Many of India’s new netizens live in rural towns or small cities and have limited educational background. These people may lack the experience or knowledge necessary to discern fake news from genuine reporting.

What is also worth noting about these new Indian netizens is that unlike the wealthier, more educated earlier generation, nine out of ten of those getting online in India now consume content not in English, but primarily in their local languages, according to a Google report. For platforms, this makes content moderation a far more difficult and complicated task. As Facebook’s user growth has come increasingly from such groups in recent years, they have found themselves at the center of longstanding and fraught conflicts. In 2018 alone, regional-language misinformation and propaganda that was spread through Facebook is blamed for fomenting violence against Muslim minority groups Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In each case, Facebook was unable to appropriately moderate their platform due to a lack of local-language-speaking staff.

This already-fraught online environment is also now becoming a battleground for China’s internet companies’ proxy war. Having launched Helo in June of this year, Bytedance has poured an estimated 20 million USD into the Indian market, already attracting over 5 million users. It has aggressively taken on ShareChat, (locally-owned, but Xiaomi-invested) for the clickbait crown, even mimicking ShareChat’s user interface such an extent that it led to a lawsuit from the Bangalore-based startup.

While it is difficult to identify proof of direct causation, it is worth noting that these platforms have risen to popularity as India has seen a wave of violence that is being blamed on fake news. It is also worth noting that the issues behind the acts of violence are the same that can be seen across these platforms.

At first glance, these look like just two more social media platforms competing for the next generation of internet users. But when comparing platforms like Helo and ShareChat to others such as Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, or Weibo, one distinction should be made. Facebook and WeChat for example, can at times, spread misinformation and stoke outrage. In fact, it has been well-documented that Facebook’s algorithms were making this worse (although they have since reorganized their algorithms to focus on “meaningful social connections”). However, these platforms were not designed with the purpose of doing that, and they provide a number of other benefits. They connect family members, facilitate financial transactions, offer a platform for innovation, and generally make life and communication easier.

Whatever fake news they promote or division they foment, the argument can be made convincingly that they serve a useful and productive purpose in society, that the world is better with them than it is without. However, while these problems may be bugs in the systems of Twitter or Weibo, it seems as though for these others, they are in fact features. 

If these news apps were to all go offline tomorrow, would the world be a worse or better place? A strong argument could be made that we’d be better off without them.

Par for the course for Bytedance

This isn’t the first time that Bytedance’s news apps have been accused of spreading fake news. Its wildly popular Chinese app Jinri Toutiao has faced a series of disciplinary action from regulators for inappropriate content. English-language Topbuzz has struggled with a fake news problem as well, and has recently taken steps to remove the patently false content that once filled the platform, although it is clear that the app aims far more to titillate and provoke outrage than it does to inform.

“At Helo, we take issues such as misinformation and fake news very seriously. We work very closely with our local content review and moderation team in harnessing our algorithms to review and take down inappropriate content,” said a company representative in an email to Hindustan Times reporters. They also claimed to be partnering with a local, non-partisan fact-checking authority to ensure that their platform’s content is safe and viable. However, even the months-old fake news posts cited earlier in the article have yet to be removed. Helo representatives also declined to mention how many people were assigned to their content moderation team.

A similar statement, if not identical, was provided when a Helo spokesperson was contacted for this piece.

However, after being severely cracked down on by Chinese regulators in April, Bytedance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming promised that the company would employ as many as 10,000 Chinese content moderators. In foreign markets, however, where their platforms’ content could impact the results of elections, there does not seem to be such a sense of urgency.

When looking at the content Bytedance’s news platforms throughout the world and in various different languages, the algorithms tend to promote the same type of articles: Those that foment anger and divisiveness, running along fault lines such as racial and religious issues, often involving controversial and famous celebrities and political leaders. Its algorithms are designed to get clicks, and it has learned that few things attract eyeballs like outrage. What the algorithm seems unable to determine is whether or not the content is accurate.

While Bytedance’s algorithms have found that fake news-fueled outrage is the trick to drive user engagement on their news apps, for their video app Tiktok (formerly Musical.ly in some markets), underage sexuality seems to be the magic ingredient, as we at Technode covered in detail last month.    

What is perhaps most disappointing is how Bytedance (the world’s most valuable startup) has chosen to respond to the much-deserved criticism that it receives. While publicly releasing such boiler-plate statements as the one given to Hindustan Times reporters above, the company’s representatives behave far more questionably behind the scenes. When a YouTube video went viral for drawing attention to the underage sexuality and safety risks posed by Tiktok, Bytedance filed a complaint with YouTube (a platform on which Bytedance advertises heavily), claiming falsely that the uploader of the viral video was guilty of copyright infringement. Although initially removed by YouTube, they have since put the video back up.

Indeed, Bytedance’s PR is known for such bullying tactics. In the famously cut-throat world of the Chinese internet ecosystem, Bytedance has stood out as willing to go even further than most to silence their critics, using unfounded accusations of defamation or copyright infringement to bully small, independent outlets to remove stories. In other situations, they will pressure publishers’ investors, hoping that keeping the negative stories online just won’t be worth the trouble. These tactics are frequently discussed and complained about in China tech circles, even leading Tencent’s low-key chairman Pony Ma to complain publicly about “black PR.”

Bytedance is fully aware of the social problems that their platforms are causing. And they seem willing to go further than most to make sure the public doesn’t know about them.

In over their head?

To look at the profile of Bytedance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming is to see what seems to be a contradiction. A 35-year-old self-proclaimed “geek,” Zhang has famously said that his greatest strength is his ability to delay gratification in pursuit of a longer-term goal. This has certainly helped him as an entrepreneur, having build his startup into the most valuable in the world.

However, there is an irony here as well, that the man who is so disciplined has created a product designed to take advantage of those who do not have the same personal strength, and to exploit the psychological vulnerabilities of those who know no better.

Although, on second thought, maybe it makes perfect sense that Zhang Yiming is peddling products that he himself would likely never use. After all, any good drug dealer knows not to get high on their own supply.

Or maybe he his simply a good student of Chinese history, and has learned that selling an addictive and harmful product to foreign markets, and then attacking those who sound the alarm about its negative effects, can be quite a profitable business.

Maybe still Zhang is simply a victim of his own success. Few entrepreneurs start a company expecting it to be worth $75 billion. But what he has created may have far broader ramifications. As is demonstrated by Russia’s use of American social networking platforms to interfere in Western elections, misinformation campaigns can be a tool used by adversaries to disrupt a country’s internal politics. At this current moment when China faces greater international tensions, a pushback to their rising influence in Asia, and territorial disputes along their border with India, the last thing that Beijing needs is accusations from an opportunistic Indian politician sounding the alarm about how Beijing-based Chinese companies are spreading misinformation among the impressionable Indian electorate….

To be clear, all evidence suggests that these companies are interested in nothing more sinister than simply acquiring more users.  However, of all people, Zhang Yiming would know that a headline with such a sensational accusation would certainly attract a lot of clicks…