In this episode of NL Recess, writer and host of the podcast The Seen and the Unseen Amit Varma joins Chitranshu Tewari to talk about evolving media cultures and patterns in the digital space, the binaries of “bhakts” and “wokes”, and the difficult bracketing of Indian conservatism.

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Vanita Kohli-Khandekar is a journalist and author, whose book The Indian Media Business: Pandemic and After was released in October this year.

In this interview with Chitranshu Tewari, Vanita explains the relationship between how broadcast media makes media and what the audience gets to see, the business economics of ad-funded media, and the lack of government foresight in seeing media as an industry.

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Sophie Zhang is a former data scientist at Facebook, now Meta, who published a series of articles in the Guardian on the social media platform’s fake engagement accounts. She alleged these often lead to interference in political elections.

In this interview with Chitranshu Tewari, Sophie describes the suspicious patterns of behaviour she observed in 2019 with respect to India. On the company’s reluctance to act on matters involving fake accounts in India, she points at “political pressure and the general lack of motivation of the company to police its own system”.

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