Outlook magazine cover
The story so far: Kapil Sibal, India’s telecommunications minister, last week asked Internet companies and social media sites like Facebook to pre-screen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online. [More here in NYT and here a round-up of censorship in the country]
Yesterday, in a column titled “virtual reality” in The Asian Age, Shashi Tharoor defended Kapil Sibal:
And yet this very freedom is its own biggest threat. It means anyone can say literally anything and, inevitably, many do. Lies, distortions and calumny go into cyberspace unchallenged; hatred, pornography and slander are routinely aired. There is no fact-checking, no institutional reputation for reliability to defend. The anonymity permitted by social media encourages even more irresponsibility: people hidden behind pseudonyms feel free to hurl abuses they would never dare to utter to the recipients’ faces. The borderline between legitimate creative expression and “disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content” becomes more unclear.
Mr Sibal’s main concern was not with politics, but with scurrilous material about certain religions that could have incited retaliatory violence. People say or depict things on social media that might be bad enough in their living rooms, but are positively dangerous in a public space. The challenge of regulating social media is that the person writing or drawing such things does so in the privacy of his home but releases them into the global commons. My own yardstick is very clear: I reject censorship. Art, literature and political opinion are to me sacrosanct. But publishing inflammatory material to incite communal feelings is akin to dropping a lighted match at a petrol pump. No society can afford to tolerate it, and no responsible government of India would allow it.
That position has got me almost as much hate mail on the Internet as poor Mr Sibal. But I’d rather stub out that match than close down the petrol pump. {Read the full column here]
Here Nilanjana Roy demolishes Sashi Tharoor’s column:
This has been an inescapable feature of the Internet since the 1990s, so why is it a problem now? And why is the nature of the Internet itself being used as an excuse to press for government regulation of the Internet? The most effective networks (Twitter, Facebook), web encyclopaedias (Wikipaedia) and forums online do not depend on silent censorship or overt censorship to be comfortable spaces for the average user. They rely on a combination of internal moderation–Twitter is ruthless about blocking fake and spam accounts, for instance, personalised screening, where every user sets his or her privacy levels, and the group’s own, evolving standards of what is acceptable behaviour. What is acceptable on sites like Grindr, for instance, are highly sexual images; on sites like 4chan, abuse is part of the conversation; but Twitter would very quickly kick off users who attempted to recreate the ambience of those sites.
Mr Tharoor’s real problem might be something that we all struggle with–the Internet in its present avatar requires much more from users than the passive consumption of news. It requires all of us to make choices about what we want to pay attention to, and the kind of communities we want to build, and it requires users to be active, responsible participants in their consumption of news and commentary. The state has no business taking over this mediation, or dictating how sanitised everyone’s web experience should be. [Full column here]
And Prayaag Akbar in The Sunday Guardian: Kapil Sibal is nobody’s fewl
Mr Sibal followed this up with a brief foray into the tumult of mass politics in India. After taking charge of negotiating on the government’s behalf with Anna Hazare’s team, he managed to alienate everyone involved in the negotiation with such alacrity (including, according to some reports, most of his own party members in the Congress) that he ended up arresting a 74-year-old man at the height of his national popularity. Finger firmly on the pulse of the country, he then proceeded to issue a series of statements defending his decision and maligning a person who — cronies aside — only wanted to do some good for India.
Now he goes and puts Internet India on trial. It is one thing to misread Anna’s Moment, but any fewl with a modem know there are three truths held self-evident by today’s Great Unwashed, the wired world. 1. The Internet shall be the greatest bastion of free speech history has known. 2. The man who fights the above (it is invariably a man) will be mocked, ridiculed, lampooned, abused and Photoshopped until his dignity lies as tattered as his logic. 3. WE MUST HAZ FREE PORN. [More here]
And Outlook cover story here
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