Even Tim Berners-Lee, with his hesitant conviction about the beneficial impact of the World Wide Web ~ when he said that “while the web has created opportunity and made our lives easier” it would be understandable if people were unsure about it being a “force for the good” ~ could not have foreseen how what was developed as an open and constructive platform three decades ago, would be so discredited by its 30th birthday.

For all the massive societal transformation that it has facilitated by ushering in the information and digital ages, the overwhelming fear of the internet stems from the perceived danger of concentration of power in the service providers and the systematic abuse by purveyors of fake news, cleverly distorted reality and even entire untruths, as is disturbingly evident in India conducting polls to choose the country’s 19th Parliament.

Indeed, the global fulminations against Facebook are for all to see, as it stands accused of permitting extraneous parties to manipulate data in a manner that threatens democracy through a vicious targeting of the mind.

Thus, even the US presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has said that Facebook, Alphabet and Amazon be broken up, while the EU contemplates taxes on tech companies. It will, however, take much more than Facebook removing more than 1,000 pages from India and Pakistan in its largest ever such action in South Asia to restore faith in the social media.

Addressing such “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, as Facebook chooses to describe this world of prevarication, is clearly not cleansing the net. Admittedly, in India, Facebook did single out the IT firm, Silver Touch, which created the NaMo app for Narendra Modi, by removing 15 Silver Touch pages, along with 103 pages from Pakistan, linked to the country’s military and 687 pages and accounts linked to the Congress.

Given that many of these “bad actors” have created accounts, reportedly obscuring their true identities even more successfully than the Russia-based Internet Research Agency had accomplished in the past, figuring out which is masquerading as independent while being linked to an organisation or political party, has proved intractable as new misleading networks of accounts continue to get spawned.

Parties victimized by such assaults choose to retaliate by returning the favour, to make the social media an abyss of anti-social conduct. As it is, the massive scale of logistics, material and manpower required to be deployed to hold the elections render the process cumbersome.

They make this a world of private electioneering, based on exploiting differences and polarising the recipients, rendering elections neither free nor fair. It is this egregious phenomenon that Facebook and its likes must combat if the democratic process has to survive in the world today.