AI technologies are increasingly deployed to support community health workers (CHWs) in high-stakes healthcare settings, from malnutrition diagnosis to diabetic retinopathy. Yet, little is known about how such technologies are understood by CHWs with low digital literacy and what can be done to make AI more understandable for them. This paper examines the potential of explorable explanations in improving AI understanding for CHWs in rural India. Explorable explanations integrate visual heuristics and written explanations to promote active learning. We conducted semi-structured interviews with CHWs who interacted with a design probe in which AI predictions of child malnutrition were accompanied by explorable explanations. Our findings show that explorable explanations shift CHWs’ AI-related folk theories, help develop a more nuanced understanding of AI, augment CHWs’ learning and occupational capabilities, and enhance their ability to contest AI decisions. We also uncover the effects of CHWs’ sociopolitical environments on AI understanding and argue for a more holistic conception of AI explainability that goes beyond cognition and literacy.

The death of Indian film star Sushant Singh Rajput at the peak of the COVID lockdown triggered chaos on the news cycle in India with a range of conspiracy theories that led to a witch hunt of sorts, and the hounding of several entertainers and public figures in the months that followed. Using data from Twitter, YouTube, and an archive of debunked misinformation stories, we examine the drivers and consequences of social media outrage in this case. We analyse these patterns from the framework of conspiracy and astroturfing and contextualize our findings to the socio-political background currently prevalent in India. Primarily, retweet rates on Twitter suggest that commentators benefited from talking about the case, which got higher engagement than other topics. Moreover, we report evidence of political hands in the way the discourse has shaped online, but more importantly that the story bears warnings for the shape and impact of witch-hunts in the backdrop of a fractured media environment. In conclusion, we consider the effects of Rajput’s outsider status as a small-town implant in the film industry within the broader narrative of systemic injustice, as well as the gendered aspects of mob justice that have taken aim at his former partner in the months since.

Dangerous speech on social media platforms can be framed as blatantly inflammatory, or be couched in innuendo. It is also centrally tied to who engages it – it can be driven by openly sectarian social media accounts, or through subtle nudges by influential accounts, allowing for complex means of reinforcing vilification of marginalized groups, an increasingly significant problem in the media environment in the Global South. We identify dangerous speech by influential accounts on Twitter in India around three key events, examining both the language and networks of messaging that condones or actively promotes violence against vulnerable groups. We characterize dangerous speech users by assigning Danger Amplification Belief scores and show that dangerous users are more active on Twitter as compared to other users as well as most influential in the network, in terms of a larger following as well as volume of verified accounts. We find that dangerous users have a more polarized viewership, suggesting that their audience is more susceptible to incitement. Using a mix of network centrality measures and qualitative analysis, we find that most dangerous accounts tend to either be in mass media related occupations or allied with low-ranking, right-leaning politicians, and act as “broadcasters” in the network, where they are best positioned to spearhead the rapid dissemination of dangerous speech across the platform.

Celebrity influencers are increasingly central to political discourse as they engage in, and get engaged with, on matters of electoral importance. In this paper, using Twitter data from 1432 sportspersons and entertainers and their engagement with the 1000 of the most followed ruling party and opposition politicians from India, we propose a new method to measure partisanship of celebrities along different modes of engagement. Our examination of polarization, through topical and retweet analyses, shows patterns related to both party incumbency and the level of internal organization. We find that the ruling BJP has been more effective than the opposition, the INC, in organized outreach to celebrities, by eschewing explicit party-based partisanship, and instead employing non-partisan narrative techniques, such as maintaining nationalism as the central theme in tweets. We find that while entertainers are equally engaged by both the ruling and opposition parties, sportspersons, who often enjoy a nationalist appeal by virtue of representing the country, tend to have a much more partisan relationship with the incumbent party.