India’s Strategy For Tackling Disinformation
The fact that such disinformation fuels citizens’ paranoia and causes them to take matters into their own hands in droves, is indicative of a lack of faith in the machinery to maintain law and order in the country that lacks an understanding of the consequences of participating in these activities, and an inability to find truth beyond the realm of their messaging inbox.
In summary, false news is a scourge in the digital age. Although it is important for individuals to take steps to protect themselves from disinformation and disinformation they cannot do so simply because they are not aware of how to go about it. By using reputable news sources, fact-checking information, and learning media literacy skills, individuals can work towards a safer news environment to protect their minds from being polluted.
Instead of holding WhatsApp responsible, India’s education needs to tackle the underlying issues that are making its people paranoid and vulnerable to the viral spread of lies. Hell, it could even use WhatsApp to do that. (Abhimanyu Ghoshal. July 2014) India must blame itself, not WhatsApp, for its devastating lynching spree) For WhatsApp though, the scrutiny it is facing in India is quite unusual. A country known for its missed-call culture, embraced the messaging platform for its free and seamless communication service. (Sundeep Khann. Mint). India is WhatsApp’s biggest market. It’s also suddenly one of the company’s biggest threats. About half a billion people have access to the Internet in India. Facebook has about 350 million users, WhatsApp has more than 200 million and tens of millions of X users. WhatsApp says it is limited in what it can do to stem the spread of harmful rumours without compromising the encrypted nature of the software.
India’s proposed legislation to regulate SM giants had provoked a backlash against what they described as ‘sweeping new rules by India. The Indian government, on the pretext of the failure of the self-regulation of SM, has initiated plans to purge harmful content of mainly YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp. They apply their own rules about what content is unacceptable and ‘promotes false news, hate speech or extremism’ Aditya Kalra. (Jan. 11, 2019). SM giants plan push-back on India’s new regulations. Gopalakrishnan S., a joint secretary at India’s IT ministry argues that the proposal is aimed at making SM safer and was not for curbing freedom of speech or imposing censorship. Facebook, WhatsApp and X would be required to remove unlawful content that affected the “sovereignty and integrity of India” within 24 hours. Industry executives and civil rights activists argue that this measure is designed to curb freedom of speech, to suppress content inimical to the government and also an indirect censorship to help the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to crack down on dissent.
The Indian government remains undaunted by such opposition. ‘I don’t get bothered by the uncalled-for campaigns,’ Prasad was quoted as saying on Feb. 20. ‘We’ll be fair, we’ll be objective, but our sovereign right to frame rules and laws will always be there.’
India’s government decided to take the easy option by apportioning blame to the instant messenger. It wanted to hold WhatsApp accountable for carrying content. Although regulators want to impose responsibilities on internet companies to “proactively screen user posts and messages in order to ensure that people don’t share anything ‘unlawful’ as yet no consensus has emerged. The rules are also being criticised for creating a new type of gatekeepers to judge what can be published and what can’t from the point of view of what is lawful and what is “unlawful” before it’s ever even shared. Apar Gupta, the executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation has slammed the new regulation as “a sledgehammer to online free speech,’ Jayshree Bajoria, Human Rights Watch, warns “We are talking about China-style surveillance here”.
The rules would force tech companies to make technical changes. Companies that don’t have the technology to monitor content would need to build it (though one issue with the proposed Indian rules is that it’s unclear, for now, what the punishment will be for failing to comply). Knowing fully well that WhatsApp’s transmission of messages are encrypted it is impracticable because it is unlikely that the company would be ready to eliminate encryption to comply with a law like this. The correlation function is not in the hands of Facebook executives, and Facebook doesn’t claim it to be so.[NEXT – The Role of Public Service Media (PSM)]