Google has refused totake down the controversial “Prophet” video (which has sparked extensiveviolence in the Middle East) from YouTube in the United States, but continuesto block it in India. Do you see that as a positive sign?
Recent developments have sensitised even the social medianetworks to the fact that there are issues which need to be addressed, that therepercussions of some of the content can have disturbing consequences. Theevents in Assam were evidence of what the social media is capable of doing.
Facebook India has taken the position that government canuse the social media positively, run counter-hate campaigns to tackle hatecampaigns.
Governments have never been able to respond to thefreewheeling social media. I think theoretically what they are saying is right. Butgovernment responses are essentially dilatory for the simple reason thatwhereas you can, as an individual, put something on the net withoutverification of any fact, the government cannot do so. A government responsemust be accurate. What it says must be fully supported by facts and data. Thattakes time and in the social media, time is of the essence.
Why the insistence ondemanding the identities of the persons operating the Twitter accounts youwanted blocked?
Governments do not snoop around for information and thisgovernment is certainly not involved in any such activity. We don’t want tofind out who is doing what. But there are situations such as, for example, whensome journalists said that what (inflammatory content) was uploaded on theiraccounts was something they were not aware of. When we actually investigatedthat “ I don't want to take any names - we figured out that they had themselvesuploaded these images and they admitted it when a show cause notice was sent tothem. One of them rang me up and asked why the notice had come andI said 'why are you worried because you've said that you had nothing to do withany of it'. And then they admitted that they had done it. Now, that isworrying. We don't want our own people being the source of spreadingdisaffection.
Internet freedom hasbecome one of the tests of democracy.
Of course you must associate internet freedom withdemocracy, because it is a platform for free expression. But there are twoelements to it which need to be addressed. The first is that the net ultimately is a vehicle forcommerce. The net survives through commerce, advertising. The most hits will beseen on sites which are by nature negative, because the positive news is seldomread.The second element that I talked of is that freedom ofexpression “ and this is true anywhere in the world - under the constitution,comes with certain responsibilities. Can a newspaper in India defame anyone andnot be subject to the law? Can a newspaper in India abuse a judge of thesupreme court and not be subject to the law? So the freedom of expression is subject to defamation, tocontempt of court, to different forms of public interest like the security ofthe state. Both the print and electronic media are subject to that.
