Shivam Shankar Singh’s How to Win an Indian Election is an insider’s candid narrative of how political parties leverage voters’ data and digital technologies for political campaigning. Singh headed data analytics and campaigns for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the Manipur and Tripura Legislative Assembly elections under the guidance of the party’s National General Secretary, Ram Madhav.
Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma and Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared the World AI Conference stage in Shanghai earlier this year. It was one of the most interesting dialogues on the future of humans and the power of digital technologies like AI. At one point in the discussion Elon Musk says, ‘If you think of technology and technology awareness, if there was a topological map of technology awareness, it’s mostly flat with a few short buildings, and then some very tall spires.
Given the importance that social media platforms (especially Facebook and WhatsApp) have acquired in our lives, the book under review has every reason to grab our attention, and rightly so. The subject acquires further importance because in recent years, social media platforms have become a vehicle for spreading hate and misinformation across India.
‘Move Fast & Break Things’ used to be Facebook’s motto till April 2014; and break plenty it certainly did. In 2019, so much appears to be broken or breaking—social harmony, democracy, various freedoms and more. There is sufficient evidence to believe that Facebook along with other Big Tech companies has played a significant role in getting us here.
Last year, a promotional video produced in Pakistan for the purpose of spreading awareness to the general public against rampant kidnapping of children from the street, which shows dramatization of a child getting picked up from a street by kidnappers on a motorcycle, was doctored in such a way that it looked like a CCTV footage of an actual kidnapping taking place.
Social media occupies enormous mind space but it is only one relatively shallow manifestation of human-computer interaction. Using Artificial Intelligence in the news industry as well as for multiple data collection applications in society is going to be the way forward.