The Egregious Exhibition Of Indian Edtech In Modern Day Social Media

Sometimes I think about the year 2020. Although marred by the wind of a global pandemic rife with lockdowns, it had experiences I shall never forget (for good reasons). I was a boy of eighteen years, studying rigorously for the Joint Entrance Examination(s) and other competitive exams in India – aspiring for a coveted seat to attend a computer science degree at the pompous Indian Institutes of Technology. My day used to comprise reading from the enormous pile of books on my table and sleeping late at night. In my free time, I consumed my daily dose of social media, i.e., Instagram and Twitter.

As the days of the pandemic progressed and the uncertainty of the examinations tagged along, I started spending more time on social media. I was intrigued by the content posted by social media influencers. My feed got filled with a barrage of posts and tweets that could generally be labelled as ‘infotainment’ and ‘motivational quotes’, brought by the oh-so-random social media algorithm. It was like being on a lighthouse on a deserted beach with waves upon waves rushing up to my shores. However, it took my naive soul a deliberate amount of time to realise that all this is just a sham.

Content marketing works in simple yet strategic ways: they produce content the masses want, and social media algorithms embrace, evolve, and escalate it. An influencer works in roughly the same way as a catalyst does in a chemical reaction – it promotes the reaction via features including but not limited to: likes, saves, retweets, shares, and primitive plain ol’ word-of-mouth. People around us follow such influencers and spread said information again to make it reach one’s curated feed.

Much of such content is in the form of one-liner motivation that does not take rather than a minute to either write by oneself or to use the even more lethargic alternative of plagiarising from internet blogs such as ‘50 Motivational Business Quotes You Haven’t Heard Yet’ from a particular www.brainshark.com. Or, it is in the form of life advice – which one would perhaps hear from a life coach, or from a mid-life senior manager who has grown out of their corporate organisation’s shell. Most of this advice is bundled with jargon one’s parents have been fleshing out since one’s childhood or from self-help books. It reeks of societal-centric norms established by an often-regressive generation, or sometimes knowledge that could be broadly defined as common sense. Yet, the story does not stop here!

Some content is in the form of experiential learnings by influencers – knowledge which we usually tend to acquiesce without any notion(s) of empirical evidence or survivorship bias. Let’s talk about Web3.0 – a purported revolutionary new technology marked by the rise of NFTs starting in late 2020 that talks about a decentralised internet, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics – to reduce the political and societal influence pushed forward with the help of technology oligarchs. It has been called a successor to the current rendition of the internet. A quick Twitter search for Web3.0 leads to nothing short of a hundred thousand results. Indian edtech influencers were quick to take suit by creating courses on these emerging blockchain and Web3 technologies. However, as would be expected, these courses were not created with the motive of actually teaching people how the blockchain works. They were in it to make money (and to help learners make money, but who would care about that, right?). Marred by BTC and ETH prices going down so rapidly and funding winters for venture capitalists – the public sentiment of the blockchain has died down into one that bears resemblance to a Ponzi scheme.

This drop in cryptocurrency prices was an unexpected phenomenon for these ‘cryptovangelists’. Less than a month after laying off 30% of its workforce, an Indian crypto trading platform headquartered in Singapore named Vauld shut down its operations in July 2022 and is in the process of closing down. Their reasons for the shutdown were stated as financial difficulties and volatility in the market. An angel investor in India named Ankur Warikoo – an influencer who speaks on finance education and creates self-help and life advice content, invested in the startup and promoted it in his YouTube videos, leading to millions of rupees by Indian investors stuck, who had looked at the personal finance influencer – often termed in today’s lingo as a ‘finfluencer’, as their messiah towards their goal of financial freedom. Several other Indian finfluencers had jumped on the bandwagon, promoting the app to their legion of followers on all social media platforms. Vauld was recently granted a three-month moratorium by a Singapore court, with operations remaining suspended.

I’m not here to question the effectiveness of influencer marketing at all. It is, essentially, what leads to the growth of businesses in the new-age creator economy. I am not here to restrict what sorts of content a social media influencer posts, either. In 2021, WhiteHat Jr – an Indian startup whose mission was to teach school kids the art of programming – came up with an ostensibly untrue and outrageous advertisement, proclaiming a 12-year-old Wolf Gupta learned how to code an Android app and was paid a sum in the range of tens of millions of rupees by NASA and Google. That is a salary that virtually no one earns as a professional software engineer in India, even after multiple years of experience. Almost two years later with lawsuits filed, several exposés of its unethical business practices, tons of gullible parents being exploited in the hopes of a ‘better future’ (read: a corporate job with a high salary) for their child, ventures into new forays such as music and art classes, acquisition by another Indian education startup with unethical business practices named Byju’s, slight layoffs here and there in 2022 – WhiteHat Jr is still up and running.

In a nutshell, the Indian ed-tech industry is odd. Peddling academic hope, it is still primarily dogged by profit-seeking entities - the first of which were its major creators. When we’re not being lectured on pedagogic paradigms for students, we’re instead being bombarded with a slew of information overload. “It is not the medium but the mind that is the problem. Whether it is online or offline, when the mind is involved in studies, distractions won’t bother students. New modes of learning should be taken as an opportunity, not as a challenge. Online learning can augment your offline learning.” During his speech at the Pariksha Pe Charcha (translated: Conversations on Examinations) summit in April 2022, which was focused on making digital education accessible to all, the Prime Minister of India – Narendra Modi, as quoted above, also emphasised the fact that students can use the ‘online’ medium to gain knowledge and execute it offline. “Going ‘inline’ (staying with one’s self) and staying away from being online or offline would bear benefit”, he stated. These words sounded cryptic and seemed oddly prophetic of what would happen next. The day after the summit concluded, a dozen edtech startups were in hot water.

And this is not just about India. In the US, speaking at a Salesforce conference, Y-Combinator’s Sam Altman has been vocal about how students should be taught concepts which can be applied to their lives right away, and not just ‘rote knowledge’. Such a sentiment echoes that of Roman Saini, the founder of Unacademy (an Indian product-based online learning platform), who said that he wanted his children to learn how to make money as quickly as possible, and not how to pass exams. In its broader context, this decidedly capitalist approach to education isn’t new. The analogy of a university as a business rather than an academic institution has been oft-repeated. Essentially, what both these unique situations point to is that education is changing.

And it is changing for a multitude of reasons that are too complex for this particular piece that I write to even begin to posit. Without wandering into the tricky territory of social media without censorship: the most effective way to monitor influence is through a combination of awareness and regulation, which is the sole responsibility of the government. It takes responsibility for advertising by private companies on television, radio, and social media, so why not these social media influencers too? The Indian government’s involvement and oversight of them have been lacklustre so far, with action taken only on incidents of massive public outrage. This leaves the field wide open for inappropriate behaviour. After the TikTok ban, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs of India issued a notification in the Official Gazette declaring regulation for social media influencers. The ministry’s Central Consumer Protection Authority stated that irrespective of the medium, form, or format, these guidelines would apply to all advertisements and other marketing communications post-March 2021.

By and large, these guidelines required endorsers to add and emphasise disclosure labels in English in promotional posts from an approved list that would be reviewed periodically. Furthermore, influencers are required to practice due diligence on the product they promote regarding claims made by the makers viz. performance and product descriptions. They were implemented in hopes to compel brands to take responsibility for their products and influencers to take responsibility for their promotions., in order to create a fraud-free and responsible atmosphere for digital marketing as a whole. In violation of the guidelines, the Advertising Standards Council of India would issue a notice to both the brand and the influencer advertising said brand. However, these guidelines leave no place for specific areas and themes of advertising and provide for a general outlook rather than an industry-specific one. It is evident that certain industries need more regulation, such as the edtech industry. To be boiled down, the Indian government and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs need to pull off a ‘Jago Grahak Jago’ on this one.