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21 August 2024 at 3:50:16 pm

Algorithmic Alibi

Meta’s handling of child sexual-abuse material has exposed the hollowness of the tech behemoth’s claim to be merely a simple intermediary. A company whose algorithms decide what millions of users see and that builds its advertising business around that distribution can hardly retreat into the role of a passive conduit when some of what it helps circulate is abhorrent. The Indian government’s contention that Meta should instead be regarded as a service provider gives it some rightly deserved...

Algorithmic Alibi

Meta’s handling of child sexual-abuse material has exposed the hollowness of the tech behemoth’s claim to be merely a simple intermediary. A company whose algorithms decide what millions of users see and that builds its advertising business around that distribution can hardly retreat into the role of a passive conduit when some of what it helps circulate is abhorrent. The Indian government’s contention that Meta should instead be regarded as a service provider gives it some rightly deserved raps on the knuckle. Meta has now agreed to report child-safety matters directly to the cybercrime portal managed by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C). Until now, such cases were reported to the United States-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The new arrangement raises the obvious question of why a company with Meta’s technological resources required regulatory pressure before establishing a direct reporting mechanism with Indian authorities. Meta’s own business model has demolished its fiction of passivity. Facebook and Instagram do not simply sit there waiting for users to post material. Their algorithms rank, recommend, personalise and amplify that material. They determine what attracts attention and, by extension, what generates engagement and advertising revenue. Meta has invested enormous resources in making those systems increasingly effective. It cannot then plead helplessness when the same machinery distributes material that it would rather not acknowledge. Meta’s systems are notoriously difficult for outsiders to scrutinise, while the company possesses vast amounts of information about how they operate. Governments, researchers and users are therefore often expected to identify problems without possessing anything like Meta’s visibility into its own platforms. The company cannot reasonably demand trust while keeping so much of the machinery that determines online visibility behind corporate walls. That said, the government has acknowledged that the courts must ultimately determine whether the company retains safe-harbour protection. But legal immunity and corporate responsibility are not the same thing. The more sophisticated Meta’s technology becomes, the weaker its excuse for failing to anticipate predictable abuses becomes. A company capable of identifying a user’s interests with astonishing precision should not find child-abuse material an unknowable phenomenon. There is a revealing asymmetry in Meta’s posture. Algorithmic power is a selling point when it increases engagement. It becomes someone else’s problem when that power produces consequences that attract regulatory scrutiny. The company wants credit for knowing what people want, while retaining the legal convenience of claiming that it cannot know what appears before them. This is selective accountability. While the courts will decide the precise limits of safe harbour, Meta should not confuse legal uncertainty with moral ambiguity. A company that designs the machinery, controls its settings and profits from its operation cannot forever wash its hands of what that machinery helps to put in front of the public.

The Confounded Viewer

Writer: Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy
Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy
Mar 29, 2025
4 min read
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, 1995
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, 1995

There was a time when there was something reassuring about looking at art, gazing upon paint on canvas, coloured pictures on flat surfaces, the occasional stone or metal sculpture. Sometimes there were also scrolls, watercolours, and lithographs. Much of it was figurative – still-life compositions, portraits, landscapes, all largely comprehensible. Art was about images that even if they were not beautiful in and of themselves, were trying to be about something bigger than our daily existence, and we exited museums feeling enriched. Then Modern Art arrived, and everything went to hell in a handbasket – at least as far as the viewer was concerned.


Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952, oil on canvas.
Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952, oil on canvas.

For many, the absence of figuration marked a watershed moment, a point in time when they could no longer understand Art, be it Jackson Pollock’s dripped paint, V.S. Gaitonde’s monochromes, or Robert Ryman’s white canvases. These works defied the very definition of art as something to be exalted, admired, understood. Wassily Kandinsky said, “An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures.” Robert Rauschenberg claimed, “An empty canvas is full.” Such statements on abstraction, though perfectly coherent within the confines of artists’ studios and salons, further alienated the already befuddled viewer, providing fodder for cartoons on the obtuse nature of the art world. Looking back, these conversations on colour – whether splattered, geometric, or non-existent – seem quaint, perhaps because what was new then is familiar now.


Modern art freed the artist – but with freedom comes great responsibility, and this also placed on them the burden of creating relevance for their work without the safety net of a known language. They persevered, because artists are meant to push boundaries and create new vocabularies. Art soon moved off the wall and out of museums entirely. Site specific land art such as Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty on Utah’s Great Salt Lake made of gravel and stone, was a statement on entropy. Not many visited, and fewer would have known they were standing on a sculpture. Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent decades planning and executing massive projects to envelop and cover landmarks, such as their 1995 wrapping of the German Reichstag in silver polypropylene fabric. The installation was meant to offer a reconsideration of urbanism and the built environment. Many, however, likened their innovative projects to construction site curtains. Art was and is an ongoing experiment to see and show things anew. Essayist Anaïs Nin wrote, “It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The [artist] shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”


Serbian conceptual artist Marina Abramovi uses her own body as a canvas in performative pieces. Mithu Sen and Ravi Agarwal’s practices results from their respective interests in feminism and the environment. They incorporate elements of drawing, sculpture, poetry, and acting, extending the tradition of theatre troops wandering through villages and politically conscious street theatre in urban India, into contemporary activism. In each case, the hope is to make the viewer an active participant who engages with the artist and their art, rather than being a passive spectator meandering through a museum looking at painted canvases hung on walls.


Artists’ repertoires are explorations of materials and ideas that are of personal interest, and not everyone needs to be making a statement on the state of the world. Atul Dodiya has a series based on his love for Bollywood memorabilia, Krishen Khanna has had a lifelong preoccupation with bandwallas. Anish Kapoor delves into the possibilities of innovative materials at a grand scale in his installation art, and at a smaller scale, buying the exclusive rights to Vantablack, the world’s blackest black paint, invented in 2014. There is art made of found objects, animal carcasses and unmade beds. There are multi-media works using lights and videos and crumbling concrete. The rotting banana that caused peals of laughter (pun intended) around the world was the subject of a previous article by yours truly. NFT tokens are sold for art made out of bits and bytes and doesn’t even really exist. Artists, as is their wont, move on to new and uncharted territories, being very present in the moment, sometimes even ahead of the times.


It is the viewer who is left without a playbook by which to understand the vocabulary and language of individual artists. Whether it is the role of the artist or the critic or anyone at all, to educate the viewer is a question up for debate. Perhaps Pollock was right when he said, “Each age finds its own technique... the strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.” It is equally possible that Vladimir Nabokov was the prescient one: “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.” Even if “the public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with,” (Golda Meir), so long as the artist is creating, society will continue to play catch-up, and be the richer for it.

(Meera is an architect, author, editor, and artist.)

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