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Indian Internet advocates and journalists are in an uproar this week over the news that the government has blocked access to around 300 websites, pages, and social media accounts in an effort to quell communal violence in the turbulent northeast. The rationale is that inflammatory online content has fanned tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in states including Assam, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra, contributing to a mass exodus from the region and violence in other cities. The offending content included fabricated images of violence against Muslims, apparently circulated to incite retaliatory attacks, according to news reports.
India
limited cell phone SMS messages to five per user per day for 15 days, and
instructed Internet Service providers and companies, including Facebook and
Google, to cut off access to the doctored content, the reports said. Those
companies said publicly that they complied where the requests were in
accordance with international norms and their own user guidelines, according to
the BBC. Twitter was less
responsive, the BBC reported.
Speech that
can incite imminent violence contravenes international law, but India's
knee-jerk censorship has worrying implications for press freedom. Bangalore's Center for Internet and Society
notes that some local and international news outlets were blocked between
August 18 and August 21, including Al-Jazeera and the UK's Telegraph.
The center's
Pranesh Prakash goes on to list
some other ways that the blocking has infringed on the media's regular
operations. We've reproduced three here with minor edits for clarity:
- Most importantly, even people and posts debunking rumors have been blocked.
- Some of the Twitter accounts are of prominent people who write for the mainstream media.
- Quite a number of the links include articles published and reports broadcast in the mainstream media (including a Times Now report, a Telegraph picture gallery, etc.), making the blocks suspect.
There are
still more causes for concern. With SMS news services increasingly essential in
areas with low Internet penetration, restricting mass texts is no longer simply
a freedom of speech issue--it affects the news, too. While India has the third
largest online population in
the world, rural areas and low-income communities rely on mobile phones to
connect with the outside world.
What's more,
if Indian officials had a strong record of working with advocates of free
expression over Internet regulation, they might have avoided some of the
pushback they have faced domestically. But they don't. Many observers
believe that the government's motivation lies beyond simply barring speech that
could incite violence; they believe other motives include "polishing the
government's image," to borrow a phrase from London-based analyst Angela Saini.
Some aspects
of the official response to the crisis lend weight to this view. India's Home
Ministry alleged that some of the doctored content originated in Pakistan,
according to news reports. Yet with few Pakistani websites the target of
blocks, the basis for that assertion is not yet apparent, according to the
Center for Internet and Society. The Indian
Express reported that only one-fifth of the banned pages even
mentioned the northeast, and that inflammatory posts on that region were largely
from Indian users. (Some questionable content about the treatment of the Muslim
Rohinga minority in Burma may have originated in Pakistan, according to the Express.) The subsequent spat between
Islamabad--which denied the allegations--and New Delhi--which promised to release
"proof" of Pakistan's intentions--politicized the issue without calming
tensions. Then the government threatened websites with legal action if the
content was not removed, news reports said. Finally, on Tuesday, Internet service
providers blocked six Twitter accounts spoofing India's Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh, after Twitter did not respond to June requests to take them down,
according to the BBC. (Twitter has said it is reviewing
that request now.)
It is
unfortunate that this effort to tamp down on caricatures of the prime minister comes
at a time when other online information might legitimately be putting citizens'
lives at risk, since it casts the rest of the government's response to the
emergency in a distinctly self-serving light. By not communicating effectively
with the online community (where was the government's social media outreach to
debunk the fabricated images of violence?), by bullying intermediary technology
companies to enact blocks, and by muddying their message with political issues,
India has turned a sensitive communal issue into a sensitive freedom-of-information
one. This is not the last time the country will face difficult decisions about
online information. Let's hope it's the last time it's this badly managed.
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Thanks so much for a reasoned article. its a little tiring to read bombastic sensational reportage. The GoI has been shoddy in implementation, and it is difficult to condone censorship, but the reasons behind this attempt are valid.