Dr Jaijit Bhattacharya

Weaponization of narration has been going on for thousands of years, but it has been sharpened recently by using social media as a highly efficient tool to amplify the narrations.

Social media platforms, which have evolved into public platforms, continue to lack oversight to protect freedom of speech, and are driven by the whims and fancies of the platform owner.

Imagine if Google stops its Map services in India, It will destroy billions of dollars’ worth of businesses built in India over Google Maps, and make millions of drivers of aggregated cab services jobless and have severe repercussions on the economy per se. This is the high time, we must develop anything of our own.

China has now become a leader in solar panels, electric vehicles, battery technology, telecom infrastructure, mobile apps etc, in a very short span of 15 years.

This piece talks about Taiwan and South Korea's gaining prominence in becoming tech based economies.

In this week’s article, we go deeper into how the Japanese economies used the same principles, to emerge as major economic power. We will cover the other Asian super economies in the next week’s article.

All major economic powers, including the US, Europe, Japan, Korea and now China, have extended significant helping hands to their own companies, especially technology driven companies and not mere commodity companies, to make them globally dominant corporations.

Breaking away from Digital Colonisation would lead to India regaining its pre-eminence among global economies and bring prosperity to its people.

Now that the bugle call of Atmanirbhar Bharat has been raised, one has to put money where the mouth is and start supporting the Indian apps. It is high time that the government and public institutions chart out a glide path away from digital monopolies that are not completely under the control of the Republic of India.

The peril of social media is that it has the power to deeply influence voters in an unethical manner with false narrations.