On Facebook, you can block another user from seeing you or being seen by you, and even report such a user for harassment. If enough people report a piece of content, it is often taken down. On Twitter, for instance, accounts that spam, impersonate, abuse or harass can be "reported for spam". Often, Twitter users are seen requesting their followers to en masse report an account for spam and Twitter acts on it. All of these sites are particularly quick in removing pornographic content.
A post in Google's official blog on March 10 explained that while Google is committed to free speech, it does recognise its limits and regularly removes content. The post said, 'For products like Blogger, Orkut, Google+ and YouTube -- where we host the content -- we encourage users to express themselves freely, but we also want to ensure that people behave responsibly, so we set guidelines covering the use of our different services. For example, no hate speech, no copyright-infringing content, no death threats, no incitement to violence. And when we're notified about content that either violates those guidelines or breaks the law -- for example, we receive a court order -- we will remove it, or restrict it in the country where it's illegal. Earlier this year, for example, we removed a number of specific webpages from Google properties in Indiaafter a court ruled that they violated Indian law.'
Clearly, even Google is no heaven for libertarians who'd say no to any and every form of censorship. The debate on internet censorship in India is hinged on several straw men, the lack of "self-regulation" being one of them. We must question the bogey of self-regulation with the simple fact that self-regulation already exists on the internet. Which will lead us again to the question: if we have laws, direct hotlines, ISP-level blocking and even "self-regulation," why do we need new and addition rules and regulations?
The answer lies in the 2/3rd items Google did *not* remove, as it felt they did not violate Indian law or its own terms of service. There's a small, rare detail that the Google Transparency Report for January-June 2011 revealed: 'We received requests from different law enforcement agencies to remove a blog and YouTube videos that were critical of chief ministers and senior officials of different states. We did not comply with these requests.' That is what it is really about: political dissent.
It's a pity we can't know who these chief ministers and senior officials were and which YouTube videos they wanted removed. We can't really make Google tell us that. We did not elect the people who decide such policies at Google and neither do we pay Google for its services we use. We did elect our chief ministers, though, and we do pay taxes that give our bureaucrats and elected leaders salaries, and we do have the right to know thanks to a democratic Constitution. Is it too much to ask for?
On December 5, 2011, the New York Times' India Ink blog revealed that Communications Minister Kapil Sibal had summoned executives of internet companies including Facebook and Google to his office and asked them to remove some content and come up with an impossible system of "pre-screening" all content and not allowing what was 'unacceptable'. The only content the story revealed was a Facebook page that allegedly maligned Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, saying it was "unacceptable". He later denied he asked for "pre-screening" but then he also denies any intent of censorship.
A week later, Outlook magazine printed some of the pictures Sibal found offensive -- they were photoshopped caricatures of the Congress president and of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that lampooned them for corruption. These images were widely used as large posters in the Anna Hazare-led Jan Lokpal movement. Sibal in his press conference the next day said it was all about religiously offensive content. Vinay Rai, who gave samples of such religiously offensive material to the Delhi high court, told me that he got some of his employees at the newspaper he runs to find such images online.
In late December, the Maharashtra police requested a domain registrar, Big Rock, an Indian company, to simply delete the domain name www.cartoonsagainstcorruption.com, run by cartoonist Aseem Trivedi.
In April 2011 the communications ministry notified rules to the Information Technology (Amendment) Act of 2008, which provided a whole mechanism of internet censorship without involving the government at all. The rules encourages anyone to send a content removal notice to any "intermediary" (website, domain registrar, blog owner and so on) asking to remove content within 36 hours. You can do so for content you find derogatory or blasphemous but also if you find anything "disparaging" or "obscene".
An intermediary can choose not to comply, only at the risk of legal action. The complainant can file an FIR or approach the courts. The Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, tested these rules. It sent such a notice to seven websites. Six of them complied rather than face legal action. Independent bloggers or big internet companies, nobody wants to waste time and money on litigation. In one case, CIS had asked for just a comment on an article to be removed. They removed the whole article and all the comments!
Such large-scale private censorship results in what are known as "chilling effects". It is these rules that Big Rock used to justify removing www.cartoonsagainstcorruption.com without notifying its owner, Aseem Trivedi in advance, leave alone giving him an opportunity to defend his content.
Nobody is arguing for a free-for-all internet space where Indian laws don't apply. All we are asking is for Indian law to prevail on the internet and grants us our constitutional right to free speech with "reasonable" restrictions. The current mechanisms of internet censorship in India -- blocking, direct removal requests to websites, intermediary rules -- are draconian and unconstitutional. They need to be replaced with a new set of rules that are fair, transparent and accessible for public scrutiny. They should not be amenable to misuse by the powers-that-be for their own private interests.
Shivam Vij is a journalist in Delhi
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