The government of India and social media companies are heading for a showdown in India over the latter’s refusal to bow down before the BJP that has come to think of itself as an all-powerful entity that no one dares go against.
There are two crucial points of friction between the government and social media companies -- the first, the refusal of social media companies most notably Twitter to toe the BJP’s line and become yet another tool in their massive propaganda machine and has begun labelling patently false claims by the party’s spokespersons as ‘manipulated media’, and secondly the insistence of the government that social media companies fall in line with the recently enacted IT rules that make it mandatory for social media companies to rat on their users in violation of encryption protocols especially when the government of India or its agencies demands it. This, WhatsApp has challenged before the courts as being violative of the fundamental right to privacy besides also being impossible to reveal since the company itself cannot read users texts that are end to end encrypted.
While there is no doubt that social media companies need to be regulated, especially since it has been time and again proven that they are slow to react to hate speech, online harassment, online threats and other criminal behaviour, the government has not approached the issue with clean hands either. A government that has known to incarcerate people based on doctored digital evidence, claims of false ‘toolkits’ as well as fake news and obfuscation is the last one that we will trust in having our best interests at heart when it comes to our online lives.
It must be remembered that India is yet to have a digital data privacy law that regulates what the government can and cannot do with data as well as what the companies themselves can do with the data they gather from their users. Worryingly, the government has already begun to use the recently passed laws and rules to stifle freedom of speech and criticism of the government when it doesn’t suit them. Most recently, the government had asked Twitter to take down several critical tweets and withhold accounts of those who are critical of the government. This came at a time when the government was facing a barrage of criticism against its handling of the pandemic. Rather than try and tackle the problem that is the pandemic, the government has been only trying to tackle the criticism of its handling.
The government will only get more desperate as it tries to contain the fallout of its complete mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. When the focus is on propaganda, every problem will seem like an image issue. Faced with such a scenario, one is forced to grudgingly take the side of the social media companies despite falling woefully short when it comes to regulating the content that they host.
