IMO, This is more like a signal to threaten foreign companies (who anyways die to capture Indian market due to its startphone penetration and population) to comply with Government.
But FB has a huge presence in India and they can't just piss off that government without putting their employees at risk, as well as the sunk cost of their existing business. They'll actually have to block things on their end. You'll wind up with the same censorship-due-to-business-interests controversy that the NBA and other business operating in China have experienced over the past year.
>requiring them to remove any content flagged by authorities within 36 hours
Does this apply to content posted from an IP address located in India? Does it apply to content posted by a profile whose info states that they live in India regardless of where they connect from? If you don't want to be censored can you simply make a profile that lives elsewhere or connect via a vpn but friend all the same people?
Is content expected to actually removed or is it merely not shown to users who either live in or appear to connect from a location where it has been "removed".
Eg Bob in foo who doesn't believe in censoring sees a feed like
1. My friend had a great dinner out what a nice time
2. government of foo stinks they ought to take a long walk off a short pier
3. bar sucks too
James in bar sees
1. My friend had a great dinner out what a nice time
2. government of foo stinks they ought to take a long walk off a short pier
Sam in baz which wants to maintain a favorable relationship with foo and bar sees
1. My friend had a great dinner out what a nice time
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/24/22400976/twitter-removed-...
Is this an autotranslated article? What is a lakh or crore as a unit?
The only tragedy here is going to be the rights of the Indian citizen. I can't even begin to fathom how radical of a shift this would be for the global market, and I also don't really understand how the worlds most populated country will be okay with being cut off from uncensored information...
Twitter does censorship and has accepted its left leaning.
On the contrary, these platforms are masssive cesspools of censored content.
Different localities have different dominant networks. E.g. Instagram Stories and Viber in Europe, vs Snapchat and WhatsApp in the US, vs VKontakte in Russia. Clearly, banning a global dominant network will only spur the creation and migration to a more local, but likely still centralized, network. (It might still be equally, or differently but to the same degree, censorious.)
> With these platforms banned, it will be more easy for Indians to encounter information that challenges the dominant narrative of the elites.
You assume the "free range" information flowing around is free from the influence of 'the elites'. It might not be by the elites you particularly resent, but rest assured it is still going to be a strata of elites, who have the massive resources to organize, build, publish, market, brand, filter, "fact check" etc what information is allowed to flow around with what credibility.
Not from India but personally I'd much rather my government not set such precedents and not have such power to block websites. Next thing you know they'll be blocking credible sites to spread their own misinformation agenda.
If tomorrow, I say something religious in nature, would such a thing be banned by some person in California who decides it is not rational thought?
If it later turns out that aliens HAVE landed but on a diplomatic mission not an invasion force you are still a crackpot who was partially right not by dint of sagacity but more or less by accident.
The lab story was usually promoted as part of a wider narrative where covid was either portrayed as a deliberate attack by the Chinese or the accidental release of a bioweapon a narrative designed not to explicate but to distract one from laying blame on the Trump administration for its incompetent response. It frequently mixed hypothesis, conjecture, and outright lies.
You can probably be forgiven for having not known there might be a useful hypothesis when it was largely being promoted by liars with corrupt motivation mixed with lies.
Now, it's an excuse to take the air out of conservative political sentiment.
If Facebook doesn't do what those groups demand, they will be smeared in the media, suffer internal strife, and face punitive antitrust probes.
And of course, many tech executive are true believers in left-wing politics and like that they can use their positions to advance those ideas.
Totally independent of that, the general scientific community seemed to be much more opposed to the lab theory early on than they are now. It still doesn't appear to be much evidence for it beyond circumstantial stuff, but it is a possibility that more people are engaging with.
Combine these two and it isn't surprising that these platforms cracked down on this type of talk early and are slow to allowing it to start happening again.
I'm not qualified to say if the lab leak has any credence, but it wouldn't be the first time the powers at be have been wrong. Just look at the classic "WMDs in the Middle East" rhetoric that lead us to war.
Are they? It's easy to walk down the slippery road that leads to authoritarian behaviors.
Is it misleading to say that a group of doctors conspired to ensure that black Americans died of a disease they could have cured, just so that they could study their effects?
Because those are conspiracy theories, and they are both true.
India has its own social order. Why should it let its online discourse be controlled by the American social order?
This is because fake news being published by the ruling government is being tagged as manipulated media. Calls to violence by the ruling government is also being removed. Pseudoscience covid19 cires by folks from and associated with the ruling party are also being tagged.
Their argument doesn't seem relevant to the policy discussed in the article at all.
The irony.
The other side of the debate use the same American tools.
This is more a civil war in American discourse between the liberals and conservatives than anything else.
I disagree because
1) in this specific case, it seems to be part of India suppressing information, and IMO India's suppression is a much larger issue than Facebook/Twitter/Instagram propagating controlled information (their suppression is different because there are other sites, vs. India cracks down on those other sites).
2) in the more general case, banning Facebook/Twitter/Instagram is controversial and there are more moderate approaches which are at least more practical. For example, you can better educate the public, or convince them to join your own site. It would be hard, sure, but forcing the public to quit Facebook/Twitter/Instagram without full-out rioting would be harder. Heck, you can "teach" children in schools that those sites are bad and the information there is wrong - I'm not arguing you should actually do that, but it would seriously threaten them while technically preserving free speech.
If you aren't actually arguing for a full-scale ban (it was implied), then I 100% agree with what you said.
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Anyways, the main point of the above comment is to show that I'm glad such a great opinion is not only posted but it was top comment (unfortunately not anymore). It took me a long time to actually find a good argument against it even though it intuitively seemed so "wrong". I really wish this was more common on forums.
This ban isn’t because of some noble notions of protecting the public discourse. To the contrary, it seems the intention is to suppress it. It’s no secret that the Modi government is irked by criticisms of it on Twitter; it attempted to censor hundreds of tweets critical of its handling of the pandemic. Whatever the government may claim as its reasons for the (currently hypothetical) ban, it seems awfully convenient that it gets to remove the platforms which so many use to voice dissent.
One of the benefits of social media platforms is that they insulate dissenters through anonymity, and the law precipitating this ban also threatens to undermine this power by making these platforms responsible for tracing the originators of information it deems unacceptable. This is not a country where you want the government to have this power. To give you an example of what could go wrong, people in Uttar Pradesh (an Indian state) have been harassed by cops just for asking for oxygen on Twitter and Instagram for their relatives dying of COVID-19. This was because the state government wanted to cover up oxygen shortages. You can just about expect that through this law, the government will be able to find and punish those spreading what it considers wrongthink.
To your point, Indian public discourse is hardly "controlled by the moral pieties of the American elite class." Although there are in absolute numbers millions of Indians on these platforms, they are hardly a blip in the Indian population. Further, millions of Indians including myself also espouse Western values and subscribe to the “American social order” that comments in this thread implicitly refer to. Given that India is a free country, it isn’t for the government to decide whether this is good or bad, any more than the government should be able to decide which god I should worship or which school my kids should go to. India is already a massively heterogeneous country; no Indian is being forced to buy into “the moral pieties of the American elite class,” since these social media networks are strictly optional. But banning them will force people who believe similar things to find alternate places to express them, likely local alternatives where their views will be penalized. Personally, I use Twitter and Instagram to engage with people from around the world, and this will effectively restrict my ability to communicate with many of them.
You can read more about the chilling effects of these laws in this post [1] by the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian nonprofit. (One interesting byproduct of the fact that these laws require originators of information to be traceable is that they effectively constitute a ban on encryption, which I’m sure HN can appreciate is Not Good And Also Very Bad.) I don't expect that these laws will stand, since the reasoning behind them seems blatantly unconstitutional and contrary to the Indian constitution's protections for privacy and free expression.
[1] https://internetfreedom.in/pound-the-alarm-the-clock-strikes...
https://twitter.com/internetfreedom/status/13967435539050864...
I don't agree with some points mentioned by the IFF org, Couple listed as example, I still think banning them would be a bad step.
> Significant SMIs must enable automated tools (basically AI tech) to identify + take down child sexual abuse material. This can lead to function creep - extreme tech measures contemplated for a limited and serious use will start being utilized for other issues.
How else would you take it down. Hire people to sift through messages? Don't companies already do this using? Are these companies limited now by anything from using these measures given their finances and scale?
> SM platforms don't generate content - you do. They are simply intermediaries who host it. This distinction helps them avoid liability for your content.
True, then why would SM butt in as arbitrator of truth.
Besides, free expression is protected by the Indian constitution, so it's hardly for the government to decide whether Indians buy into "the Californian Elite's warped ideas."
Of course government censorship is bad. I just have no sympathy to big techs who censor others.
As for examples of how social media companies in particular shape public opinion, consider how Twitter banned Zero Hedge for many months for alleging the virus may have leaked from a lab. Now this hypothesis is mainstream, potentially only because it no longer a political tool in an intense election year. A more recent example of opinion shaping/propaganda is Facebook classifying and limiting visibility of comments that express hesitancy about vaccines (https://www.projectveritas.com/news/breaking-facebook-whistl...). The plain reality is that these companies have government-like power in censoring and shaping public opinion, but are only accountable to themselves. That should be unacceptable to Americans, and doubly so to other nations.
