But he adds that his legal challenge is not related to him. “This is bigger than any one profession. It will affect everyone.”
It points to wide discrepancies between the official account of the impact of Covid on the country and the assessment of international agencies. The World Health Organization said that Covid deaths in India were about 10 times more than the official number. Anyone pointing this out could be classified as a fake news seller, and should be removed.”
In April 2021, India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, was hit by a second wave of COVID-19 and severe oxygen shortages in hospitals. The state government denied there was a problem. Amid this unfolding crisis, a man tweeted an SOS call to get oxygen to save his dying grandfather. State authorities accused him of spreading rumors and creating panic.
Experts believe changes to India’s IT rules will allow more of this kind of repression, under a government that has already expanded its powers online, forcing social media platforms to remove critical voices and using emergency powers to censor a BBC documentary. Criticize Modi. .
Prateek Wager, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital freedoms organisation, says Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) social media team has itself spread misinformation about political opponents and pundits, while “journalists go underground”. And bringing out an inconvenient truth has faced consequences.”
Wager says the lack of clarity about what constitutes fake news makes matters worse. “Looking at the same set of data, it is possible for two people to come to different conclusions,” he adds. “Just because your interpretation of that dataset differs from the government’s does not make it fake news. If the government is putting itself in a position to fact-check information about it, the first misuse it will likely be against information that is inappropriate for the government.”
This is not a hypothetical scenario. In September 2019, police detained a journalist for allegedly trying to discredit the government after recording schoolchildren who were supposed to receive full meals from the state ate only salt and roti.
In November 2021, two journalists, Samridhi Sakonia and Swarna Jha, were arrested over their coverage of anti-Muslim violence in the northeastern state of Tripura. They were accused of reporting “false news”.
Non-binding, state-backed fact-checks do happen through the government’s Press Information Bureau, despite that organization’s checkered record for objectivity.
Media Watch website newslaasher.com compiled a number of PIB’s “fact checks” and found that the bureau simply labels inappropriate reports as “false” or “unsubstantiated” without providing any concrete evidence.
In June 2022, Tapasia, a reporter for the investigative journalism organization The Reporters’ Collective, wrote that the Indian government required children aged six and under to have a biometric Aadhar ID card in order to access food at government-run centers — in defiance. l Indian Supreme Court ruling.
A PIB Fact Check study quickly called the story fake. When Tapasya inquired under the Right to Information Act (FOI) about the action behind the labeling, PIB simply attached a tweet from the Department of Women and Child Development, claiming the story was fake—in other words, the fact that PIB did not achieve any independent research.
“Toing the government line is not a fact-check,” Tapasia says. “The government could have taken down my online story if the new IT rules were in place in June 2022.”
Social media companies have at times opposed the Indian government’s attempts to impose controls on what can be posted online. But IFF’s Waghre doesn’t expect them to put up much of a fight this time around. “No one wants litigation, no one wants to risk a safe haven,” he says, referring to “safe harbor” rules that protect platforms from being responsible for the content their users post. “There will likely be mechanical compliance, perhaps even proactive censorship of views that they know are likely to be reported.”
Kamra did not want to comment on his prospects for challenging the new rules. But he says the validity of democracy is called into question when the government wants to control the sources of information. “This is not what democracy looks like,” he says. There are many problems with social media. It has been harmful in the past. But more government control is not the answer to it.”