Centre for Internet and Society

Will You be Paid to Post a Picture?

nishant — 2014-03-06T11:58:41Z

The wave of free information production on the web is on the wane.

The article was published in the Indian Express on February 18, 2014

The age of volunteerism is officially over. The last decade of the mass adoption of the internet has been fuelled by endless human hours being spent in producing information which is the new currency of our times. The big transition to Web 2.0 began when the individual “user” became more than either an individual or the user. The individual found herself as a part of a collective, finding a voice and a community of others to belong to. Simultaneously, instead of being a passive consumer of the web, the user started producing data — blogs, videos, tweets, content management systems, online discussion boards, massively multiple online role-playing platforms, social network transactions — all of which became a part of the new Web’s widespread popularity.

Almost everything that we understand as the social web today is contingent upon people producing data in their interactions with the world around them. From knowledge producing websites like Wikipedia to entertainment platforms like YouTube, visualisation and data gathering spaces like Pinterest to photographs of self, food and cute animals on Instagram, political and social commentaries on Tumblr to Listicles and memes on Buzzfeed, the internet is a veritable smorgasbord of new information forms, formats and functions that are generated by the users.

What is possibly the most exciting about this burgeoning information universe has been the amount of free labour that goes into it, and often remains invisible. As digital labour scholar Trebor Schulz points out, the internet has become both a factory and a playground, where our leisure time is capitalised into producing work that sustains the new attention and information economies. For instance, the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, does not produce any of its contents. It is, in fact, a system of information mining and sorting, which works as long as a growing user base continues to produce information on it. Tomorrow, if all of us stop producing Facebook, and only lurk on it, the platform will collapse. Which is why, Facebook continues to acquire new platforms and applications to be integrated into its universe.

Similarly, the real effort that goes into the sustenance of sites like Wikipedia, which has become the de facto reference for global knowledge systems, is carried out by unsung and invisible editors who patiently, meticulously, and without almost any expectation, continue to add, verify, strengthen and curate reliable information that we can use. When the non-profit organisation WikiMedia Foundation prides itself in running one of the least expensive websites in the top 10 most visited sites in the world, it is signalling its deep appreciation for the countless human hours that have made Wikipedia possible.

But, in recent years, there is noticeable stagnation in the wave of free information production on the Web. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We are producing an unprecedented amount of data — we are constantly being watched by surveillance technologies that detect biometric and genetic make-up of all our transactions, or we are inviting people to watch us on social network sites where we reveal some of our deepest secrets and desires, or we are watching ourselves, quantifying everything from things we ate to the number of hours we sleep. And yet, as we live in a world of Big Data, there is a definite decrease in people contributing to production of free information.

As the digital natives move from the web to mobile phones, traditional websites are already facing a crisis. News and media agencies that have celebrated the global citizen media networks have started realising that the individual user is more interested in local networks and information ecologies which are independent of mainstream conglomerates. And people are realising that their time and effort is worth money. They can be easily compensated for their online activities and gain reputation and importance.

The tension only becomes more palpable when people start realising that there are others who are being paid to work on the platforms that they are contributing to. We all knew that this model of depending on free information was not a sustainable one. But it seems the day has arrived, especially with the recent drives on Wikipedia to build specialised knowledge editors. In the last few months, we have seen people in the FemTechNet project — an academic activist feminist project that seeks to remind us of the intersections of feminism and technology in network societies — carry out “Wikistorming”, where students are adding pages of women’s contribution to technologies on Wikipedia. More recently, medicine students at University of Chicago have taken to correcting and adding accurate information to Wikipedia, which is often a source of health information.

Both of these are fantastic efforts to add to the platform that was the underdog that overthrew the mammoth encyclopaedia like The Encyclopaedia Britannica. We hope more specialised users in different locations, fields, disciplines and languages continue to edit and contribute to Wikipedia. However, it is also a signal that the generalist information producer is on the decline. We are transitioning into a new age, where people are going to need rewards, incentives and benefits for performing information transactions on the web. The user is no longer going to be available for free labour, and it is time we started thinking of “paid usership”.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-february-18-2014-nishant-shah-will-you-be-paid-to-post-a-picture

India ‘tea parties’ enable politicians to woo urban youth with technology

praskrishna — 2014-03-06T12:13:36Z

Babalal Patel’s tiny tea stall in southern Mumbai is a long way from Silicon Valley. It is not even that close to Bangalore, the Indian equivalent.

The article by Avantika Chilkoti was published in the Financial Times on February 26, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

But one night this month this ramshackle shop became the venue for a social media experiment that highlights the high-tech face of electioneering in India, the world’s largest democracy. A crowd gathered outside to watch two television screens showing a live broadcast with Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate for the opposition Bharatiya Janata party, as he answered questions the audience submitted by text message.

Similar “tea parties” were held across the country, designed to ram home Mr Modi’s humble background as a tea seller and his technological credentials. But the nationwide event, organised using mobile technology more commonly seen in US presidential campaigns, also signals a shift in Indian politics.

For decades, political campaigns in India have centred around colossal rallies and billboard advertising. But a growing population of young people, rising internet use and the ubiquity of mobile phones mean the 2014 battle is playing out equally fiercely online.

“We are moving far ahead of saying that we are building ‘likes’ on social media,” says Arvind Gupta, head of IT and social media for the BJP. “Organisation is being done using digital. So if I’m going to tell everybody there’s an event tomorrow, it can be posted on Facebook, websites, on SMS, on WhatsApp, though the real meeting is happening on the ground.”

These techniques, which became familiar during the Arab uprisings of northern Africa, are an increasingly important part of communication strategy ahead of a national election, which must be held in the next three months, and which many believe will be close.

Mr Gupta believes parties are fighting what he calls a “postmodern election” for up to 160 - largely urban - seats of the total 543. More than half the 50-strong team working on communication for the BJP are dedicated to digital campaigning.

India’s internet user base reached a point of inflection last year, passing 200m. While that is a fraction of the 1.3bn population, prompting many to question the power of social media, use is far greater among urban and young voters, millions of whom will be eligible to vote for the first time this year.

“Social media is suddenly becoming important, not for all constituencies but for urban constituencies because for the first time the urban youth and the educated class is very much glued into the election and showing interest,” says Rajeeva Karandikar, a statistician and election analyst.

Mr Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, has adapted particularly quickly to the changing environment. He captured the public imagination by using holograms to address rallies and Google Hangouts to interact with the diaspora. He has 3.4m Twitter followers and more than 10.6m “likes” on his Facebook page, thanks in part to a slick social media team led by high-profile technology entrepreneurs. Meanwhile Rahul Gandhi, the reticent, undeclared candidate for the incumbent Congress party, does not even have a verified Twitter account.

Some were disappointed by low attendance at the national “tea parties”, but the events were lauded for being interactive and, perhaps most importantly in a country where newspaper readership remains high, grabbed column inches in local media. The audience could speak directly to Mr Modi at venues with a two-way video link and the footage was immediately available on YouTube.

“While answering each question Mr Modi has a point of view,” says Pratik Patel, 28, a chartered accountant who organised the event at his grand- father’s tea shop. “He doesn’t have two ways of looking at the same thing - this helps him to be more decisive and forward thinking.”

Social media also provides swaths of information to India’s political parties, as they copy the sophisticated data analytics used by US president Barack Obama’s campaigns.

From its offices in suburban Mumbai, the digital marketing group Pinstorm tracks what social media users are discussing at the constituency level and identifies significant supporters or critics. It describes the service as an early warning system or “social radar”, which allows parties to mobilise workers rapidly to oppose or support a point of view.
Sceptics argue, however, that social media has insufficient traction in India to affect results of the forthcoming poll. But the size of the user base does not reflect its full power. It is educated influential Indians who use these digital networks and the online debate shapes views in traditional media that reach a wider audience.

“The theory is that since the elites are connected and have more time to spare on social media, let us use social media and the internet more generally to influence discourse through these elites,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. “It’s an indirect route to the vote.”

An adviser to the Obama campaign warns, however, that, given differences in funding and the local environment, India’s politicians should be wary of using the US presidential race as a model. This year a simpler technology may prove the best tool for campaigns in India: the mobile phone.

“Folks look to the Obama campaign for this sort of stuff,” says Ethan Roeder, who worked on data for the 2008 and 2012 US presidential campaigns. “But a lot of these international campaigns would do best looking elsewhere for a model . . . No campaign in the history of the world has ever spent that much money to elect a single individual to a single office.”

India’s version is, of course, markedly cheaper, thanks to the roadside chai-wallahs and armies of volunteers, pulling in the new breed of voters.

“I have never attended a political rally in my entire life,” says Mr Patel, who helped organise Mr Modi’s nationwide “tea party”.

“If people want to connect with me they need to connect with me on social media or via email.”

Modi’s digital army

The team building the digital campaign for India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata party mixes entrepreneurs and veterans from the technology industry, rather than individuals with experience of electioneering alone.

Rajesh Jain, working on electoral technology, is well known in the industry since setting up successful businesses in online news and digital marketing. These include IndiaWorld Communications, a collection of websites which was bought in 1999 by Satyam Infoway, then India’s largest internet service provider.

He has the archetypal curriculum vitae, with a degree from one of the eminent Indian institutes of technology followed by a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York.

Arvind Gupta, who heads the BJP’s IT and social media cell, has a remarkably similar educational background - with an added stint in Silicon Valley to his name.

At the last count, the party had recruited more than 2m volunteers, who are organised online and will provide support in different ways. But there is also a younger generation of advocates who have given up good jobs to join the digital effort. Citizens for Accountable Governance is a non-profit youth organisation co-ordinating nationwide “tea parties” ahead of this year’s national election, where Narendra Modi, the party’s prime ministerial candidate, interacts with audiences at tea stalls via video link.

About 100 young professionals lead the operation and all come with impressive credentials, including jobs at prominent global consulting groups such as McKinsey, and banks such as JPMorgan.

Beyond that, Mr Modi has had a team working for him personally since he took over as chief minister of Gujarat more than a decade ago.

It is a discreet IT set-up that still functions independently of the party’s operations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/financial-times-february-26-2014-india-tea-parties-enable-politicians-to-woo-urban-youth-with-technology

India's social media election battle

praskrishna — 2014-04-03T09:37:03Z

Ahead of the general elections, political parties in India are attempting to woo voters on social media for the first time.

The article by Atish Patel was published by BBC on March 31, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Politicians are taking part in Google+ Hangouts, televised interviews organised by Facebook and using the Facebook-owned smart phone messaging app WhatsApp to connect with millions of tech-savvy urban voters.

India's 16th general election - to be held in nine phases over April and May - will be closely fought, with some observers saying social media will play a vital role in deciding which party wins the most seats.

According to a report published in April 2013 by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and the Mumbai-based Iris Knowledge Foundation, Facebook users will "wield a tremendous influence" over the results of the polls in 160 of India's 543 constituencies.

It's a finding political parties have taken note of, with major contenders like the ruling Congress party and main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) earmarking 2-5% of their election budgets for social media, according to an October 2013 study by IAMAI and Mumbai-based market researcher IMRB International.

Big data

During the last general election in 2009, social media usage in India was minuscule.

Today, however, Facebook has 93 million users and Twitter has an estimated 33 million accounts in the country. Many political parties have beefed up their online presence as a result.

The main opposition BJP's prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, was among the first Indian politicians to set up a website and today is on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

His main rival, Rahul Gandhi, the Congress party's undeclared candidate for PM, however, doesn't have a website and doesn't use any of the three major social networks.

Anti-corruption campaigner-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal has amassed 1.5 million followers on Twitter since joining in November 2011, a year before he launched his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and over two years after Mr Modi, who has 3.6 million followers, opened his account.

"Now no serious politician is seen as being able to avoid social media altogether," said Congress government minister Shashi Tharoor, who until he was overtaken by Mr Modi last July, was the most followed Indian politician on Twitter.

"It does have a significant reach in certain segments of the population and as far as we're concerned, that's important enough to pay attention to and clearly the opposition is paying attention to it too," he added.

Taking a leaf from US President Barack Obama's presidential campaigns, India's parties are using tools to crunch the insurmountable amounts of information social media generates - what's known as big data analytics.


Rahul Gandhi doesn't have a website and doesn't use any of the three major social networks

Pinstorm, a digital marketing agency used by some of India's biggest companies to monitor what is being discussed online, now has political parties as clients.

From its Mumbai office, the agency has been collecting, storing and analysing tens of thousands of political statements from over 100 online platforms daily for the past six months to allow parties to find supporters and tweak their political message.

The agency is able to track conversations at national and local level, making it a useful tool for both national and regional parties.

The anti-corruption AAP, taking part in its first general election after an impressive debut in local polls in Delhi last year, uses Pinstorm to "compare how we are faring against others", said Ankit Lal, the party's social media strategist.

Professor Amit Sheth and a team of researchers at the Ohio Centre of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing at Wright State University have also been tracking political sentiment online since July.

He says data collected from social media could in the future replace opinion polls, which many observers say are often rigged in India.

"With social media data, we can measure sentiments, for example, before a rally, during the rally, and post-analysis. It's much more frequent [than opinion polls]," Mr Sheth said.

'Dipstick of the elite'

There are some, however, who are doubtful about social media's expected effect.

Social media "is not a true dipstick. It really is only a dipstick of the elite," said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

Sceptics believe with so many Indians illiterate and lacking internet access, particularly in rural swathes of the country, it is still essential for political leaders to hold rallies and spend on billboard and newspaper advertising to reach the majority of the 814 million-strong electorate.

Parties are also interacting with voters on their mobile devices and it makes sense.


Facebook has 93 million users in India

There are more mobile phones in India today than toilets, according to the latest census data, and just over half of the country's 1.2 billion population owns one.

"Mobile is very integral to our strategy," said Arvind Gupta, who heads the BJP's IT and social media cell.

One of the BJP's most unique electioneering tools allows potential voters to listen in on Mr Modi's rally speeches in real time on their phones from anywhere in India. "It's our own innovation," said Mr Gupta.

The number of smartphone users is growing in India and it's how most of the country's web users go online.

That's why WhatsApp, recently purchased by Facebook, is being used by the likes of the BJP and Congress to send photos, videos and messages to potential voters.

"No other medium gives as much mass, simultaneous reach as mobile phones in India today," said Milind Pathak from One97 Communications, a Delhi-based mobile marketing firm.

Political parties like AAP have signed up tens of thousands of members by urging people to give them a missed call for free - party officers then get in touch and formally enrol them as supporters.

"Looking forward, I think the medium will continue to be a heavily-invested area for a political party," Mr Pathak said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bbc-news-india-atish-patel-indias-social-media-election-battle

The Age of Shame

nishant — 2014-04-04T04:05:31Z

The ability to capture private images is breeding a dangerous form of digital shaming. Within the online space, where wonderments often run rife, and conspiracy theories travel at the speed of light, there are many dark recesses where netizens half-jokingly, self-referentially, in a spirit of part-truth, part-exaggeration, often wonder on what the real reason is for the internet to exist.

Dr. Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on March 30, 2014.

Within the online space, where wonderments often run rife, and conspiracy theories travel at the speed of light, there are many dark recesses where netizens half-jokingly, self-referentially, in a spirit of part-truth, part-exaggeration, often wonder on what the real reason is for the internet to exist.

One suggestion, and probably the most persuasive one, drawing from the Broadway musical Avenue Q, is that the internet was made for porn. Positing a competing argument is a clowder of cat lovers, who insist that the internet was made for cats. Or, at least, it is definitely made of cats.

From the first internet memes like LOL Cats (and then subsequently Grumpy Cat, Ceiling Cat and Hipster Kitty), which had pictures of cats used for strong social, cultural and political commentary, to Caturday — a practice where users on the Web’s largest unmoderated discussion board, 4Chan, post pictures of cats every Saturday — cats are everywhere.

I want to add to this list and suggest that the internet was meant for “shame”. With the explosion of the interactive Web, more people getting access to mobile computing devices, and more websites inviting users to write reviews, leak pictures, expose videos and reveal more personal and private information online, there seems to be no doubt that we live in the age of digital shaming.

The aesthetic, also embedded in peer-to-peer platforms like chatroulete, or snapchat, where people often engage in sexting, is also becoming common in popular media. The ability to spy, to capture private images and videos, and expose the people who violate some imagined moral code has dangerous implications for the future of the Web and our own private lives. And as more of it goes unpunished and gets naturalised in our everyday digital practices, it is time to realise that the titillation it offers through scandal is far outweighed by the growing stress and grief it causes to victims. While there are some values to public shaming that ask for more transparency and accountability, we need to reflect on how it is creating societies of shame.

It sometimes emerges as an attempt to shame governments, private institutions, places of consumption, for compromise of the rights of the users.

Anything, from denial of service and corruption in government offices to bad food and substandard goods in restaurants and malls, is now reported in an attempt to shame the people responsible for it. This kind of “citizen journalism” allows for individual voices and experiences to be heard and documented, and the people in question are forced to be accountable for their jobs.

From fascinating websites like IPaidABribe.com to restaurant review sites like Zomato, we have seen an interesting phenomenon of “naming and shaming” that gives voice to individual discontent and anger. And so commonplace has this become, that most managers of different services and goods track, respond and mitigate the situation, often offering apologies and freebies to make up for that one bad experience.

Most big organisations have Twitter handles that function in a similar way, addressing grievances of users in real time, and helping to deliver better services and products. It is a new era of granular accountability that ensures that individual acts of discrimination, neglect or just disservice get reported and have direct impact on those responsible for it.

On the other end of the spectrum of this call for transparent and accountable structures, is the phenomenon of shaming and cyber bullying that is also increasing, especially with digital natives who spend more time online. On social networking sites, it has become almost passé, for personal and sensitive information to be leaked in order to shame and expose a person’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Especially for young teens who might be in a disadvantaged position — for reasons of sexual orientation, location, practices or interests — the shaming through exposing their private information often creates extremely traumatic conditions, even leading people to take their lives.
Shaming takes up particularly dire forms on websites and platforms that are designed to leak this kind of information. Hunter Moore, who has recently earned the title of being the most hated man on the internet, was the founder of a revenge-porn website, which invited male users to reveal sexual and embarrassing pictures of their former girlfriends and even spouses, to reveal them in compromising positions and shame them for being “sluts”.

Moore’s website has been shut down now and he is facing multiple charges of felony in the US, but that one site was just the tip of the iceberg. Slut shaming and trying to humiliate women has become a strong underground practice on the dark web. Hidden by anonymity and the security that the Web can sometimes offer, people betray the trust of their friends and lovers and expose them to be punished by voyeuristic audiences.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-march-30-2014-nishant-shah-the-age-of-shame

When politics gets social

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T07:52:46Z

In the run-up to the general election, social media companies explain how the political campaigns this time are very different from what they were five years ago.

The article by Chanpreet Khurana was published in Livemint on March 11, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

“Okay, I didn’t gain anything. I lost,” Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s Arvind Kejriwal conceded disarmingly during a town hall meeting on Facebook last week. He was responding to a question from Candidates 2014 host Madhu Trehan on his much critiqued dharna (sit-in protest) during his 49-day chief ministership of Delhi.

Even as elections to 543 constituencies approach, political parties and politicians are putting their online campaigns in top gear. Sample some of the activity in just the last week. On Sunday, the Indian National Congress party asked voters to share their thoughts on what to include in the party’s Lok Sabha election manifesto—on Twitter. On 8 March, Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate, held the second session in his Chai Pe Charcha with NaMo series—this time on women’s empowerment. And All India Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s “Girls are our assets” post on Facebook was liked more than 22,000 times.

	Recognizing the high level of engagement around politics on social media, companies like Facebook and Google are driving initiatives on this theme in peak election season—polling starts on 7 April. The Facebook Talks Live’s Candidates 2014 series (also broadcast on NDTV), which in its first week featured Kejriwal, Banerjee, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad and the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, is one example. There are many new services being launched online in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.

Recognizing the high level of engagement around politics on social media, companies like Facebook and Google are driving initiatives on this theme in peak election season—polling starts on 7 April. The Facebook Talks Live’s Candidates 2014 series (also broadcast on NDTV), which in its first week featured Kejriwal, Banerjee, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad and the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, is one example.

There are many new services being launched online in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.

Know your candidate

On 20 April 2011, US President Barack Obama appeared on Facebook Talks Live, opening the floodgates for a new kind of engagement between political leaders and the electorate. Cut to almost three years later, and the Facebook-led “town hall” meeting has come to India. On 4 March, Candidates 2014 launched with Kejriwal taking questions on issues like women’s safety, reservation for the backward classes and the plight of contractual workers, and detailing his vision for the country. A video of the town hall is available on Facebook and YouTube and has been viewed at least 30,000 times. As part of the format of the town hall, the questions came in equal parts from the live audience, Trehan and from a pool of questions submitted on the Facebook India page.

To the agile leader then, social media can be more than just another pulpit to broadcast views and give a speech from. It’s something Sunil Abraham, executive director of The Centre for Internet And Society, a non-profit research organization, can’t stress enough. “Social media provides unmediated access; in that sense it is a tremendously effective tool,” says Bangalore-based Abraham in a phone interview. “The question is, are political parties agile enough to take advantage of it?”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-march-11-2014-chanpreet-khurana-when-politics-gets-social

No to homosexuals, yes to their vote

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T09:54:39Z

The ad appears at the bottom of the page. It has BJP’s symbol and Modi’s photograph displayed prominently.

The article by Yogesh Pawar was published in DNA on March 21, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

In a hotly contested election where every vote will count, the scramble among political parties to scrounge for votes is understandable. Yet, what would you make of a party that hates a community but wants their votes? The BJP had opposed any move to nullify Supreme Court's order re-criminalizing consensual sex among consenting adults, dealing a huge setback to any move to scrap or dilute Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Party chief Rajnath Singh went to the extent of saying, "Gay sex is not natural and we cannot support something which is unnatural."

This is why the gay community across the country has expressed surprise to find a BJP ad asking for votes on the popular gay social media dating website grindr. The ad which will obviously lead to to a lot of red faces in the BJP, appears at the bottom of the page has both the party' lotus symbol and their prime-ministerial candidate Narendra Modi's photograph displayed prominently. It exhorts voters to vote BJP to stop price rise.

"This exposes the party's hypocrisy," guffawed India's pioneering gay rights activist Ashok Row Kavi. "So you want our votes and not us. I'm glad this has happened. The country will finally know the true face of falsehood of the party."

He's not alone. Many from the community have taken to social media sites like facebook and twitter to make their disgust known. Counselling psychologist Deepak Kashyap is one of them. "So, #BJP says it'd never support the "unnatural act" of homosexuality, but #NaMO has no qualms about asking for support on gay dating apps, like grindr! What a sham(e)!" he posted.

Linking most homophobia with an intense struggle with latent homosexuality Kashyap, the University of Bristol pass-out and equal rights activist for the LGBTQ community told dna, "Whatever makes you jump up in your chair, essentially makes you insecure about your own condition in some way or the other." According to him, similar results were shown in a research called 'Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?', by Georgia University published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

When reached for comment, the BJP's National IT head Arvind Gupta said, "I am not aware of such an ad being placed on this website. If this is indeed true we will take it up with the advertising agency responsible." BJP spokesperson and Lok Sabha candidate from New Delhi Meenakshi Lekhi too told dna, "This is the first I am hearing of such an advertisement," and added, "In the first instance it seems like a deliberate act of mischief in the poll season to embarrass our party."

Centre for Internet and Society, Executive Director Sunil Abraham felt the ad on grindr may have to do more with the lack of knowledge than anything else. "We find many ads by top Indian corporate brands on pirate websites. This happens because people are still not completely conversant with negotiating with advertising networks when it comes to websites."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dna-march-21-2014-yogesh-pawar-no-to-homosexuals-yes-to-their-vote

Networks: What You Don’t See is What You (for)Get

nishant — 2014-05-28T09:30:45Z

When I start thinking about DML (digital media and learning) and other such “networks” that I am plugged into, I often get a little confused about what to call them.

The blog entry was originally published in DML Central on April 17, 2014 and mirrored in Hybrid Publishing Lab on May 13, 2014.

Are we an ensemble of actors? A cluster of friends? A conference of scholars? A committee of decision makers? An array of perspectives? A group of associates? A play-list of voices? I do not pose these questions rhetorically, though I do enjoy rhetoric. I want to look at this inability to name collectives and the confusions and ambiguity it produces as central to our conversations around digital thinking. In particular, I want to look at the notion of the network. Because, I am sure, that if we were to go for the most neutralised digital term to characterise this collection that we all weave in and out of, it would have to be the network. We are a network.[1]

But, what does it mean to say that we are a network? The network is a very strange thing. Especially within the realms of the Internet, which, in itself, purports to be a giant network, the network is self-explanatory, self-referential and completely denuded of meaning. A network is benign, and like the digital, that foregrounds the network aesthetic, the network is inscrutable. You cannot really touch a network or name it. You cannot shape it or define it. You can produce momentary snapshots of it, but you can never contain it or limit it. The network cannot be held or materially felt.

And yet, the network touches us. We live within networked societies. We engage in networking – network as a verb. We are a network – network as a noun. We belong to networks – network as a collective. In all these poetic mechanisms of network, there is perhaps the core of what we want to talk about today – the tension between the local and the global and the way in which we will understand the Internet and then the frameworks of governance and policy that surround it.

Let me begin with a genuine question. What predates the network? Because the network is a very new word. The first etymological trace of the network is in 1887, where it was used as a verb, within broadcast and communications models, to talk about an outreach. As in ‘to cover with a network.’ The idea of a network as a noun is older where in the 1550s, the idea of ‘net-like arrangements of threads, wires, etc.’ was first identified as a network. In the second half of the industrial 19th Century, the term network was used for understanding an extended, complex, interlocking system. The idea of network as a set of connected people emerged in the latter half of the 20thCentury. I am pointing at these references to remind us that the ubiquitous presence of the network, as a practice, as a collective, and as a metaphor that seeks to explain the rest of the world around us, is a relatively new phenomenon. And we need to be aware of the fact, that the network, especially as it is understood in computing and digital technologies, is a particular model through which objects, individuals and the transactions between them are imagined.

For anybody who looks at the network itself – especially the digital network that we have accepted as the basis on which everything from social relationships on Facebook to global financial arcs are defined – we know that the network is in a state of crisis.

Networks of crises: The Bangalore North East Exodus

Let me illustrate the multiple ways in which the relationship between networks and crisis has been imagined through a particular story. In August 2012, I woke up one morning to realise that I was living in a city of crisis. Bangalore, which is one of my homes, where the largest preoccupations to date have been about bad roads, stray dogs, and occasionally, the lack of a nightlife, was suddenly a space that people wanted to flee and occupy simultaneously.

Through the technology mediated gossip mill that produced rumours faster than the speed of a digital click, imagination of terror, danger, and material harm found currency. The city suddenly witnessed thousands of people running away from it, heading back to their imagined homelands. It was called the North East exodus, where, following an ethnic-religious clash between two traditionally hostile communities in Assam, there were rumours that the large North East Indian community in Bangalore was going to be attacked by certain Muslim factions at the end of Ramadan.
The media spectacle of the exodus around questions of religion, ethnicity, regionalism and belonging only emphasised the fact that there is a new way of connectedness that we live in – the network society that no longer can be controlled, contained or corrected by official authorities and their voices. Despite a barrage of messages from law enforcement and security authorities, on email, on large screens on the roads, and on our cell phones, there was a growing anxiety and a spiralling information explosion that was producing an imaginary situation of precariousness and bodily harm. For me, this event, was one of the first signalling how to imagine the network society in a crisis, especially when it came to Bangalore, which is supposed to represent the Silicon dreams of an India that is shining brightly. While there is much to be unpacked about the political motivations and the ecologies of fear that our migrant lives in global cities are enshrined in, I want to specifically focus on what the emergence of this network society means.

There is an imagination, especially in cities like Bangalore, of digital technologies as necessarily plugging in larger networks of global information consumption. The idea that technology plugs us into the transnational circuits is so huge that it only tunes us toward an idea of connectedness that is always outward looking, expanding the scope of nation, community and body.

However, the ways in which information was circulating during this phenomenon reminds us that digital networks are also embedded in local practices of living and survival. Most of the time, these networks are so natural and such an integral part of our crucial mechanics of urban life that they appear as habits, without any presence or visibility. In times of crises – perceived or otherwise – these networks make themselves visible, to show that they are also inward looking. But in this production of hyper-visible spectacles, the network works incessantly to make itself invisible.

Which is why, in the case of the North East exodus, the steps leading to the resolution of the crisis, constructed and fuelled by networks is interesting. As government and civil society efforts to control the rumours and panic reached an all-time high and people continued to flee the city, the government eventually went in to regulate the technology itself. There were expert panel discussions about whether the digital technologies are to be blamed for this rumour mill. There was a ban on mass-messaging and there was a cap on the number of messages which could be sent on a day by each mobile phone subscriber. The Information and Broadcast Ministry along with the Information Technologies cell, started monitoring and punishing people for false and inflammatory information.

Network as Crisis: The unexpected visibility of a network

What, then, was the nature of the crisis in this situation? It is a question worth exploring. We would imagine that this crisis was a crisis about the nationwide building of mega-cities filled with immigrant bodies that are not allowed their differences because they all have to be cosmopolitan and mobile bodies. The crisis could have been read as one of neo-liberal flatness in imagining the nation and its fragments, that hides the inherent and historical sites of conflict under the seductive rhetoric of economic development. And yet, when we look at the operationalization of the resolutions, it looked as if the crisis was the appearance and the visibility of the hitherto hidden local networks of information and communication.

In her analysis of networks, Brown University’s Wendy Chun posits that this is why networks are an opaque metaphor. If the function of metaphor is to explain, through familiarity, objects which are new to us, the network as an explanatory paradigm presents a new conundrum. While the network presumes and exteriority that it seeks to present, while the network allows for a subjective interiority of the actor and its decisions, while the network grants visibility and form to the everyday logic of organisation, what the network actually seeks to explain is itself. Or, in less evocative terms, the network is not only the framework through which we analyse, but it is also the object of analyses. Once the network has been deployed as a paradigm through which to understand a crisis, once the network has made itself visible, all our efforts are driven at explaining and strengthening, and almost like digital mothers, comfort the network back into its peaceful existence as infrastructure. We develop better tools to regulate the network. We define new parameters to mine the data more effectively. We develop policies to govern and govern through the network with greater transparency and ease.

Thus, in the case of the North East exodus, instead of addressing the larger issues of conservative parochialism, an increasing backlash by right-wing governments and a growing hostility that emerges from these cities that nobody possesses and nobody belongs to, the efforts were directed at blaming technology as the site where the problem is located and the network as the object that needs to be controlled. What emerged was a series of corrective mechanisms and a set of redundant regulations that controlled the number of text messages that people were able to send per day or policing the Internet for spreading rumours. The entire focus was on information management, as if the reason for the mass exodus of people from the NE Indian states and the sense of fragility that the city had been immersed in, was all due to the pervasive and ubiquitous information gadgets and their ability to proliferate in p2p (peer-to-peer) environments outside of the government’s control. This lack of exteriority to the network is something that very few critical voices have pointed out.

Duncan Watts, the father of network computing, working through the logic of nodes, traffic and edges, has suggested there is a great problem in the ways in which we understand the process of network making. I am paraphrasing his complex mathematical text that explains the production of physical networks – what he calls the small worlds – and pointing out his strong critique about how the social scientists engage with networks. In the social sciences’ imagination of networks, there is a messy exteriority – fuzzy, complex and often not reducible to patterns or basic principles. The network is a distilling of the messy exteriority, a representation of the complex interplay between different objects and actors, and a visual mapping of things as they are. Which is to say, we imagine there is a material reality and the network is a tool by which this reality, or at least parts of this reality, are mapped and represented to us in patterns which can help us understand the true nature of this reality.

Drawing from practices of network modelling and building, Watts proved, that we have the equation wrong. The network is not a representation of reality but the ontology of reality. The network is not about trying to make sense of an exteriority. Instead, the network is an abstract and ideological map that constructs the reality in a particular way. In other words, the network precedes the real, and because of its ability to produce objective, empiricist and reductive principles (constantly filtering out that which is not important to the logic or the logistics of the network design), it then gives us a reality that is produced through the network principles. To make it clear, the network representation is not the derivative of the real but the blue-print of the real. And the real as we access it, through these networked tools, is not the raw and messy real but one that is constructed and shaped by the network in those ways. The network, then, needs to be understood, examined and critiqued, not as something that represents the natural, but something that shapes our understanding of the natural itself.

In the case of the Bangalore North East Exodus, the network and its visibility created a problem for us – and the problem was, that the network, which is supposed to be infrastructure, and hence, by nature invisible, had suddenly become visible. We needed to make sure that it was shamed, blamed, named and tamed so that we can go back to our everyday practices of regulation, governance and policy.

The Intersectional Network

What I want to emphasise, then, is that this binary of local versus the global, or local working in tandem with global, or the quaintly hybridised glocal are not very generative in thinking of policy and politics around the Internet. What we need is to recognise what gets hidden in this debate. What becomes visible when it is not supposed to? What remains invisible beyond all our efforts? And how do we develop a framework that actually moves beyond these binary modes of thinking, where the resolution is either to collapse them or to pretend that they do not exist in the first place? Working with frameworks like the network makes us aware of the ways in which these ideas of the global and the local are constructed and continue to remain the focus of our conversations, making invisible the real questions at hand.

Hence, we need to think of networks, not as spaces of intersection, but in need of intersections. The networks, because of their predatory, expanding nature, and the constant interaction with the edges, often appear as dynamic and inclusive. We need to now think of the networks as in need of intersections – or of intersectional networks. Developing intersections, of temporality, of geography and of contexts are great. But, we need to move one step beyond – and look at the couplings of aspiration, inspiration, autonomy, control, desire, belonging and precariousness that often mark the new digital subjects. And our policies, politics and regulations will have to be tailored to not only stop the person abandoning her life and running to a place of safety, not only stop the rumours within the Information and communication networks, not only create stop-gap measures of curbing the flows of gossip, but to actually account for the human conditions of life and living.

[1]. This post has grown from conversations across three different locations. The first draft of this talk was presented at the Habits of Living Conference, organised by the Centre for Internet & Society and Brown University, in Bangalore. A version of this talk found great inputs from the University of California Humanities Research Institute in Irvine, where I found great ways of sharpening the focus. The responses at the Milton Wolf Seminar at the America Austria Foundation, Austria, to this story, helped in making it more concrete to the challenges that the “network” throws to our digital modes of thinking. I am very glad to be able to put the talk into writing this time, and look forward to more responses.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dml-central-april-17-2014-nishant-shah-networks-what-you-dont-see-is-what-you-for-get

The quest for genuine clout on the internet

praskrishna — 2013-10-29T07:08:40Z

There is a lot of interest and speculation on the impact of social media on politics because of its amplification effects.

The article by Karthik Subramanian was published in the Hindu on October 13, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

There is no denying that it has overtaken the traditional media in certain facets of news - most notably when it comes to breaking news and that it provides grounds for expressing one's ideas unbounded.

But the marketing and the advertising world are only just coming to grips with the medium. (Twitter is set to launch its IPO soon and Facebook is going to increasingly face the need to monetize its services. The Web has a history of complaints where users have found it tough to different between user-generated content and 'promoted' content.)

In effect, the question of the “influence” that social media and its star patrons wield is still being assessed, especially in the loaded context of whether its proactive use would translate to votes in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Not only are the number of active social media users negligible in the Indian context, there are doubts on whether a 'cause and effect' scenario is possible.

There are two predominant points of view, while talking about the influence of social media campaigns on politics: One that closely reads the Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter trends as an important measure of public pulse; and the other which dismisses any sort of influence that social media has on real and grass root level politics.

T. Vishnu Vardhan, a researcher at Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, prefers the middle ground. “It is important to not ignore the growing popularity of social media in India with [telecom] service providers providing Facebook access at Rs. 1 for an entire day. However, I would refrain from seeing a direct correlation between a person's participation on social media to real-time events in society including politics.”

Propaganda fallacy

“In India and especially in Tamil Nadu it has been proved that the Propaganda Model is a fallacy. There is no simple formula, whether it be cinema of 1970s or the Social Media of the 2010s. There are too many factors and layers that influence real-time events.”

Companies around the world are trying to make sense of this 'Big Data' that people's digital lives are generating. And whilst individuals and even some clever campaigns make snap pronouncements based on superficial data and analysis, there are a few companies that are looking at it through the prism of complex algorithms and technology-enabled web crawling.

One such company Kochi-based startup Riafy Technologies is attempting to make sense of the digital noise in a broad sweeping sense looking at three domains: relational intelligence, predictive analysis and big data.

One of the their applications 'Movie Tarot' predicts the outcome of Friday releases at the movie box office, based on the digital traffic on the days preceding the release. Not every instance of praise or every denouncement is treated equally. Instead, they have an intelligent algorithm that they apply to predict the box office collections and the ultimate verdict. (They claim to have a fairly accurate track record thus far.)

The company's CEO John Mathew says there is a correlation between a person's online presence and behaviour in the real world. “This influence is significant in age groups of 18-34,” he says. “As for Lok Sabha elections, the 'social media influenced' voter turnout would be marginal when we look at the country as a whole, but this number would be substantial in the 'swing constituencies'.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-october-13-2013-karthik-subramanian-the-quest-for-genuine-clout-on-the-internet

YouTube is the answer to what has changed in India

praskrishna — 2013-11-20T07:00:48Z

Alternative Law Forum’s Lawrence Liang on relaunching Creative Commons, and how it changes the legal landscape of copyright issues.

The article by Moulishree Srivastava was published in Livemint on November 20, 2013. Lawrence Liang was quoted.

Creative Commons (CC), a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, US, which enables Internet users to share and use the creativity and knowledge of others, on Tuesday relaunched its India chapter after six years. CC provides free copyright licences that give creators a way to share their creative work, on conditions of their choice.

In India, for instance, Pratham Books, a not-for-profit publisher, licenses its content under a CC licence that allows others to use the content (on certain conditions). And the National Council of Educational Research and Training has created a portal where digital versions of its course material have been uploaded under a CC licence.

In an interview, Lawrence Liang , co-founder of Alternative Law Forum and chairman of the board at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, which is one of the CC affiliates in India, spoke about the re-launch, what went wrong the last time, what it means for the country and how it changes the legal landscape of copyright issues. Edited excerpts:

People all over the world are already using CC licences. What does this relaunch mean for India?

There are two things. One is the legal component. The licences have been tailor-made for Indian law. Tomorrow, if someone were to use CC licence and there were violations and it came up in court, this (the CC licence) would be in compliance with the Indian Copyright Act. The other is, we have a very large number of young people who are entering the space of making creative works. The CC means for them to be aware that there are options they have apart from traditional copyright licensing.

How does it impact the legal landscape of copyright issues?

In the US, you have something called derivative rights, which is conversion of one medium into another medium. In India, you don’t have that idea; you have the right of adaptation, which is a much more narrowly defined idea. It has the specific definition of what the adaptation is. There is the right to adaptation of a work from, say, literary into dramatic, but it doesn’t mean conversion of a work into any form.

The second is in terms of presumption of how you gain ownership over copyright, which is slightly different in India than it is in the US.

In India—section 17 (of the Constitution) lays out different classes of work—there are different presumptions of who the owner of copyright is, which becomes very important. For example, if a film-maker wants to license his work, now it has to be clear that he is the owner of the copyright in the first place, because the presumption in India would be that the producer is the owner of the work, whereas in Europe the producer is the first owner of the work. These are some of the small differences that CC attempts to clarify.

What went wrong the last time?

When it was first launched (in India) in 2007, perhaps there wasn’t the momentum. Last time CC was launched as a licence in India, but not as a community, which was the key issue. Second, it was institutionally housed in IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Bombay and it needed being pluralized. You can’t depend on CC being housed in one single institution. It should be in as many institutions as possible, which is what has happened this time. The crucial thing here is that we will be developing a community. A lot more people know about CC now than they did back in 2007.

Why do you think it will succeed?

One is the overall awareness about open source and alternatives. The other one, which is more crucial, is, when CC was launched in the US, it was in response to a very clear crisis. The crisis was that a large number of users were being prevented from using existing works. Lawrence Lessig (one of the co-founders of CC) felt that there was a need to create a legal alternative. There was already, in a way, a certain kind of environment which allowed CC to automatically speak to a number of people’s concerns. In India, we didn’t have that. Copyright was anyway not being enforced. That’s happening now. So once people could use YouTube, could create remixes, then they suddenly realized that they have used a film song and other copyrighted content. Then they suddenly realize a need of legal content as alternative. YouTube is the answer to what has changed.

What does it mean for the media?

It depends on whether you are looking at it from the perspective of a media producer or a user. From the perspective of a media producer, one of the big things that people assume is that everything is copyrighted until stated otherwise and that you can’t use it. There are a number of people who will be very happy to use it, but they may not want to use it commercially. With a CC licence, the boundaries are clear. What you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do is extremely clear. One of the biggest problems in the digital landscape at the moment is opacity. You are not sure. There is an image on a website, which seems to be used in many places. Am I allowed to reproduce it? What is the extent to which I can use the content? A lot of these will be rendered clear for media practitioners.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-november-12-2013-moulishree-srivastava-you-tube-is-answer-to-what-changed-in-india

Election Commission to monitor conduct of political parties on Facebook, Twitter and Google

praskrishna — 2013-12-30T07:02:06Z

With Congress and BJP hammering away at each other in the ongoing assembly contests that will set the stage for national polls next year, the Election Commission wants to make sure social media and online platforms run by Google, Facebook and Twitter are not used to breach the code of conduct that governs candidates and parties. The commission's key concerns relate to malicious content and exceeding the campaign expense limit.

The article by Ajmer Singh was published in the Economic Times on November 25, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

The Election Commission, which summoned the social media companies to a meeting last Monday, directed them to cooperate in monitoring content. They were asked to set up a mechanism that would help prevent posting of material that could vitiate the election atmosphere, according to Election Commission officials who are aware of the development and didn't want to be named. If such content is posted, the mechanism should also allow for its speedy removal, they said.

"It is difficult to monitor and track content on social media or Internet sites, since the servers are based out of the US," said one of the officials cited above. "EC has asked social media giants to cooperate for compliance with the code of conduct, pre-certification of advertisement on the web and monitoring malicious content."

The companies declined to comment and referred ET to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) for a response. "It was a sensitising meeting on the code of conduct with some legal and corporate affairs representatives of Internet firms which are members of IAMAI," said Subho Roy, president of the grouping.

"The Election Commission representatives explained to us the model code of conduct, its importance during the last 48 hours of the election, the pre-certified advertisements and why they were important in accounting of the candidate's expenses. They also wanted to understand from us what are the current methods of removing illegal content from websites under existing laws. The Election Commission also assured us that at no point there would be any attempt to censor social media," said Subho Roy, IAMAI president and one of those present at the November 18 meeting.

The commission has classified social media into five types - collaborative projects such as Wikipedia; blogs and micro blogs such as Twitter; content communities such as Google-owned YouTube; social networking sites such as Facebook; and games and apps.

"We have received many complaints about misuse of social media platforms, and it is becoming unmanageable. So all these sites shall now be strictly monitored and asked to comply with EC's instructions," an official said.

According to Election Commission guidelines, "Legal provisions relating to election campaigning apply to social media in the same manner in which they apply to any other form of election campaigning using any other media."

The social media companies will also need to make sure that any advertising they carry conforms to the rules.

An official said social media companies have been asked to "keep an eye on any breach of model code of conduct, in respect of any party or candidate who posts hate messages or creates hatred or tension between different castes, communities, religions, etc. The social media giants have been directed to ensure pre-certification of advertisement on web/social media (clearance of political advertisement by a committee before being displayed in social media/web by any registered party or by any group or association)".

An executive at one of the companies said it would be difficult to keep a check on what was being posted as this may count as a breach of privacy, besides being impinging on other rules.
"It is a highly contentious issue and (it's) impossible to monitor malicious content," said this person who didn't want to be named. "The diktat issued by EC can't be implemented since it overrides the Information Technology Act. We all comply with the IT Act, and the model code of conduct is not for us but for political parties and candidates."

A privacy advocate pointed out the difficulties that the social media companies may face when it comes to implementing the Election Commission guidelines.

"This is what we call proactive censorship or proactive monitoring and may interfere with the intermediary's immunity from liability, when they have no actual knowledge of content. It may be in conflict with provisions of the IT Act (Section 79) and could have serious privacy implications," said Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet Society, and an expert on privacy laws. "Pre-censorship is required by Indian law and courts only for cinema that is exhibited in theatres. In the case of books, this type of censorship has been held to be unconstitutional. This case is worse because it is private pre-censorship of user-generated content that is not subject to judicial review."

The Election Commission had, on October 25, asked candidates to provide information about social media accounts and expenditure on online campaigns. It had clarified that the provisions of the code of conduct would apply to the Internet, including social media websites.

A Congress member said social media accounts would be difficult to police as these may be in the name of individuals and have no direct links to parties or candidates.

"The biggest problem is that candidates or political parties may not be operating their Twitter handles or posting advertisements on Facebook or the web, but (through) an unknown Internet army, which builds up a social media campaign and posts hate messages," the person said. A senior Congress MP, who didn't want to be named, suggested that such efforts were extensive on behalf of BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat.

"More than 90% of Twitter traffic is emanating from Rajkot, Ahmedabad and Baroda, all in Gujarat," this person said. "Who are these people, campaigning and managing an obnoxious campaign?"

BJP denied that its Internet campaigns were in violation of any Election Commission guidelines.
"There is no truth in these allegations and Congress has little understanding of this," said Arvind Gupta, who heads BJP's IT cell. "Narendra Modi has a pan-India presence and is a popular leader, they are just jealous of him. We have a social media cell, which acts responsibly and complies with guidelines."

Election Commission officials said social media companies have been asked to resolve issues related to malicious content and provide details of serious infringements. The ministry of communications and information technology has also been asked to suggest ways of tackling the matter.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/economic-times-november-25-2013-ajmer-singh-election-commission-to-monitor-conduct-of-political-parties-on-facebook-twitter-google

Delhi gang rape: What Facebook, Twitter expose about govt

praskrishna — 2012-12-31T01:02:44Z

When constable Subhash Tomar collapsed during the anti-rape agitation in New Delhi, the government was keen to say he suffered injuries inflicted by the protesters. But the administration's version of events was challenged soon on social media, and the mainstream media latched onto the mystery and started pressurising the government to come clean.

The article was published in the Times of India on December 29, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The Tomar episode, when social media set the agenda and put the government on the back foot, is one more example of rise of people's power online. The political class in India has been shaken by the speed and efficiency with which the recent protests were coordinated. Some of them, like Abhijit Mukherjee, have ended up putting their foot in their mouth while others like Congress' youth icon and heir apparent Rahul Gandhi have not even cared to react.

The reason for Tomar's death is still unclear, but the post-mortem report has attributed it to external injuries.

"Frankly, right now, we haven't figured out how to deal with this phenomenon," said Congress Party Spokesman Sandeep Dikshit.

The anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, and the Arab Spring were all largely organised through social networking sites. Even in neighbouring Pakistan, the raid that killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was first reported on microblogging site Twitter, further highlighting social media's growing importance as a source of information. Such is the influence and impact of social media that many are increasingly referring to it as the "fifth pillar of democracy".

Influence bound to grow

India has over 120 million internet users - Twitter has about 16 million and Facebook over 60 million - but this is still just one-tenth of the population.

Also, as 3G penetration increases, data becomes accessible on more feature phones. While about 221 million mobiles were sold in India in 2012, sales are expected to touch 251 million units in 2013, according to technology market researcher Gartner. With so much of growth still left to come, the influence of social media is only bound to grow.

Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor, one of the early converts to social media and inveterate tweeter, said the social media space is a "parallel universe to the mainstream media" and that stories on these platforms have a "resonance of their own".

"It is a medium that allows big issues to be made out of issues that mainstream media ignores but politicians cannot," he said.

Brand guru Harish Bijoor is of the view that the political class must pay attention to the information revolution as India is a very young country in terms of demographics. "The political class appears a gerontocracy while 54% of the population is below 25 and 70% below 35. There is a disconnect that must be addressed."

Kedar Gavane, director at Internet analytics company ComScore India, said an average Indian Facebook user has about 300 friends. "That's the kind of reach an individual and his messages have on social networks," he said. "Twitter has helped us identify the common man's feelings. For instance, when a candlelight protest is organised, you get to know what the protesters are thinking."

But the real question, he said, is whether people are actually willing to go beyond these platforms. "Whether it can become the Fifth Estate or not is hard to say because at the end of the day, this is just a channel for communication."

With the government struggling for a credible response to the growing influence of social media, it has often resorted to blocking user accounts and web pages. The government, which blocked 663 webpages in 2012, asked Indian Internet service providers to block 16 Twitter accounts, including those of right-wing leaders and journalists.

In the first half of 2012, the government made 2,319 requests for information on 3,467 user accounts of search engine giant Google. Google complied with 64% of these.

While the influence of social media is not lost on those such as Dikshit, he said the problem is "how to break in with an alternative view". "It is like a community of people who think the same way and validate each others' opinions. The number of people who validate your opinion does not make it the right opinion, but that fine distinction is getting lost somewhere."

There are others who feel the role of social media in protests is often exaggerated. "The agency for change resides first in people and only secondarily in platforms," according to Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society.

(With inputs from Joji Thomas Philip in New Delhi)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-december-29-2012-delhi-gang-rape

Clash of the cyberworlds

praskrishna — 2013-01-15T06:57:48Z

In an increasingly digital world, the issue of Internet freedom and governance has become hugely contested. Censorship and denial of access occur across the political spectrum of nations, even in liberal democracies.

The article by Latha Jishnu, Dinsa Sachan and Moyna was published in Down to Earth magazine's January 15, 2013 issue. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

In run-up to the just-concluded World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, there was a frenzied campaign to ensure that governments kept their hands off the Internet. It was feared the International Telecommunications Union, a UN body, was aiming to take control of the Internet. That hasn’t happened. But the outcome in Dubai has highlighted once again the double speak on freedom by countries that claim to espouse it and by corporations interested in protecting their interests, says Latha Jishnu, who warns that the major threat to the Internet freedom comes from the wide-ranging surveillance measures that all governments are quietly adopting. Dinsa Sachan speaks to institutions and officials to highlight the primacy of cyber security for nations, while Moyna tracks landmark cases that will have a bearing on how free the Net remains in India.

For months now a little-known UN agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), has been looming large in cyberspace, portrayed as an evil force plotting to take over the Internet and threatening to destroy its freedom by rewriting archaic regulations. ITU, set up in 1865, is primarily a technical body that administers a 24-year-old treaty, International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), which are basic principles that govern the technical architecture of the global communication system.

	How did the 193-nation ITU, which regulates radio spectrum, assigns satellite orbits and generally works to improve telecom infrastructure in the developing world, turn into everyone’s favourite monster in the digital world? The provocation was ITU’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, where ITRs were proposed to be revised. Leaked documents of the proposals made to ITU had shown that statist countries like Russia and China, known for their crackdown on Internet freedom, had put forward proposals to regulate digital “crime” and “security” aspects that are currently not regulated at the global level for want of consensus on balancing enforcement with protection of individual rights.

Other proposals were about technical coordination and the setting up of standards that enable all the devices, networks and software across the Internet to communicate and connect with one another. Although ITU secretary general Hamadoun I Touré had emphasised that the Dubai WCIT was primarily attempting to chart “a globally agreed-upon roadmap that offers future connectivity to all, and ensures sufficient communications capacity to cope with the exponential growth in voice, video and data”, there was widespread scepticism among developed countries.

Online subversion in India AT the seventh annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan, last November, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal was a star turn. He made an elevating speech about the need to put in place a “collaborative, consultative, inclusive and consensual” system for dealing with policies involving the Internet. India, with 125 million Internet users—a number that “is likely to grow to about half a billion over the next few years”—would be a key player in the cyberworld of tomorrow, he promised. According to the minister, Internet governance was an oxymoron because the concept of governance was for dealing with the physical world and had no relevance in cyberspace. These were high sounding words that crashed against the reality of India’s paranoia over online subversion. For starters, Sibal flew into a media blitz over Google’s transparency Report which ranked India second globally in accessing private details of its citizens. Even if it was a far second behind the US, it was an embarrassing revelation for the government which appears to have been rather enthusiastic in seeking information on the users of its various services. Such user data would include social networking profiles, complete gmail accounts and search terms used. In the first half of 2012, India made 2,319 requests related to 3,467 users compared with 7,969 requests by the US. Globally, Google clocked a total of 20,938 requests for user data. A few days down the line there was a public explosion over the arrest of two young women in Palghar, near Mumbai, for posting a prosaic comment on Facebook over Bal Thackeray’s death. Thanks to the deliberately vague wording of Section 66A of the IT Act, such arrests have become common and Rajya Sabha devoted a whole afternoon to discuss the impugned legislation and seek its withdrawal. Sibal’s response has been to issue guidelines on the use of this Section which civil society organisations say will do nothing to sort out matters. Then there are the IT (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, issued under Section 79 of the IT Act, which have been used indiscriminately by business interests to shut down websites, resulting in unbridled censorship of the Internet time and again. Although a motion for its annulment was moved in Parliament by Rajya Sabha member P Rajeeve, it was withdrawn after Sibal promised to talk to all stakeholders. A host of MPs have termed the rules a violation of right to freedom of speech besides going against the laws of natural justice. The promised meeting of stakeholders has not yielded any results and censorship on grounds of possible online piracy continues. In this regard, India is more restrained than the US which has pulled down huge numbers of domains on the ground they were violating intellectual property by selling pirated goods.

Western global powers, behemoth Internet companies, private telecom corporations and almost the entire pack of civil liberties organisations came together in a frenzied campaign to ensure that ITU kept its hands off the Internet. Massive online petitions were launched, backed by Internet companies such as search engine Google and social networking service Facebook. The Internet, they said, should not become an ITU remit because it would change the multi-stakeholder approach, which currently marks the way the Internet is governed, and replace it with government control that would curb digital freedom. Not only did the US administration oppose the revision of ITRs, the US Congress also passed a rare unanimous resolution against the WCIT proposals.

In the end, it was an anti-climax: nothing much came of these proposals. Although WCIT was marked by high drama—a walkout by the US and six European countries, a show of hands on a contested but innocuous resolution and an unexpected vote—the “final acts” (http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Documents/final-acts-wcit-12.pdf) or the changes in ITRs make no mention of the I word. Not once. The 30-page document states at the outset that “these regulations do not address the content-related aspects of telecommunications” —an indirect reference to the Internet.

	Ultimately, it was a triumph of the US-led position even if 89 of the 144 eligible countries signed it. Most of the developed countries refused to sign it. Nor, unexpectedly, did India, and thereby hangs a curious tale. Officials who were privy to the negotiations told Down To Earth that India was all set to sign the new ITRs when its delegation got last-minute instructions from Delhi not to endorse them. “It was unexpected and a let-down for India and our global allies,” confesses an official of the Ministry of Communications & IT. “There was nothing in the final document that we had objections to.” According to the grapevine, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal was facing pressure from two sides: the US Administration and domestically from civil society, Internet service providers and the private telecom players who had objected to India’s proposals on ITRs. The US is known to be keeping a close eye on what India decides to do on the new treaty which it can still ratify. In the Dubai treaty, the only ITR that does impinge on the Net is (Article 5B) on unsolicited bulk electronic communications or spam. But even here, what it merely states is that member-states should endeavour to take necessary measures to prevent the “propagation of unsolicited bulk electronic communications and minimize its impact on international telecommunication services.”

In many ways, what took place during the hectic days before and during the December 3-14 WCIT was in a broad sense a replay of the Cold War scenario of the good (freedom-loving countries) versus evil (authoritarian or autocratic regimes), although alliance may have shifted in the two blocs. What is clear is that a larger geopolitical fight is playing out with the Internet as disputed terrain. American analysts themselves have pointed out that the “US got most of what it wanted. But then it refused to sign the document and left in a huff.”

Even the innocuous Article 5A, which calls on members “to ensure the security and robustness of international telecommunication networks”, was interpreted by US delegation head Terry Kramer as a means that could be used by some governments to curb free speech!

As an outraged Saudi delegate said, “It is unacceptable that one party to the conference gets everything they want and everybody else must make concessions. And after having made many concessions, we are then asked to suppress the language which was agreed to. I think that that is dangerous. We are on a slippery slope.” The final outcome: all the contentious issues were relegated to resolutions, which have no legal basis.

Indeed, the US has managed to get its way on most issues: protecting the mammoth profits of its Internet companies and ensuring that control of the Internet address system, now done by a group based in the US, will not be shared with other ITU members. And, the likes of Google (2011 profit: $37.9 billion) and Facebook will not have to pay telecom companies for use of their networks to deliver content.

Challenges of securing cyberworld

E-commerce in India, where every tenth person is online, is on the rise—and, consequently, crime on the Internet. In 2011, the country’s nodal agency for handling cyber crime, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, tackled 13,301 incidences of security breach. The incidents ran the gamut from website intrusions, phishing to network probing and virus attacks. Further, in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 (until October), there were 201, 303, 308 and 294 cyber attacks respectively on sites owned by the Indian government. Most notably, hacker group Anonymous defaced the website of Union Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal.

To beef up cyber security, the Union ministry plans to pump in Rs 45 crore in 2012-13. It also put up a draft cyber security policy for public comments in 2011. Currently, cases involving cyber security and crime are handled under the IT Act of 2000 (Amendment 2008) and the Indian Penal Code.

But will the government go about its business of securing the Net in a responsible manner? There is scepticism. Section 69 of the Act gives any government agency the right to “intercept, monitor or decrypt” information online. Chinmayi Arun, assistant professor of law at National Law University in Delhi, said at the Internet Governance Conference held at FICCI in October that crimes like defamation are not on the same page as cyber terrorism, and “we have to question whether they warranty invasion of privacy”. She added that the workings of the surveillance system has to be made more open to build public trust.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bengaluru, draws attention to a fundamental flaw in the section. “Government is allowed to wire tap under the Telegraph Act, 1885. But the Act lays out specific guidelines for such an action. For example, you can only tap phones in the case of a ‘public emergency’ or ‘public safety’ situation. The IT Act does not put such limitations on interception of information,” he says.

Cyber security and ITU

A few months prior to the controversial World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, countries, including Russia and Arab states, had proposed measures that would, through International Telecommunication Union (ITU), grant disproportional power to countries to control the Internet in the name of security measures. Several proposals, most notably those of India and Arab States, explicitly stated in the proposed Article 5A that countries should be able to “undertake appropriate measures, individually or in cooperation with other Member States” to tackle issues relating to “confidence and security of telecommunications/ICTs”. It raised alarm among civil society. US-based think tank Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) said in its report dated September, 2012, that cyber security does not fall under the ambit of International Telecom Regulations, and some countries would misuse such privileges for “intrusive or repressive measures”.

The proposal by African member states recommended that nations should “harmonise their laws” on data retention. In other words, intermediaries would have to retain public data for a long period so that governments can access it whenever they please. With regard to this, CDT noted, “Not only do national laws on data retention vary greatly, but there is ongoing controversy about whether governments should impose data retention mandates at all.”

A clause in the Arab proposal on routing said, “A Member State has the right to know how its traffic is routed.” Currently, the way Internet works, senders and recipients do not know how data between their computers travels or is routed. However, enabling countries to have control over routing has its dangers. CDT notes, “(This) would simply not work and could fundamentally disrupt the operation of the Internet.” Internet traffic travels over an IP network. While travelling, it is fragmented into small packets. Packets generally take a different path across interconnected networks in many different countries before reaching the recipient’s computer. CDT notes providing routing information to countries would require “extensive network engineering changes, not only creating huge new costs, but also threatening the performance benefits and network efficiency of the current system”. Although routing was not part of India’s proposal, Ram Narain, deputy director general at the department of telecommunications, told Down To Earth it was one of the country’s concerns.

However, to civil society’s partial relief, such draconian cyber security clauses were not adopted in the new itr treaty. Two clauses added to the treaty, Article 5A and 5B, address some cyber security concerns. Titled “Security and robustness of networks”, Article 5A urges countries to “individually and collectively endeavour to ensure the security and robustness of international telecommunication networks”. Article 5B talks about keeping tabs on spam.

Prasanth Sugathan, senior advocate with Software Freedom Law Centre, an international network of lawyers, says while he would have preferred that the two clauses were kept out of the new treaty, they do not seem harmful. “They are a much toned down version of what Arab states and Russia had suggested,” he says.

This is one reason India, Brazil and other democracies from the developing world also want a change in ITRs. They want the Internet behemoths to pay for access to their markets so that such revenues can be used to build their own Internet infrastructure.

In the furious debate on keeping the Net free of international control even hawk-eyed civil society organisations prefer to ignore the monetary aspects of Net control. Some analysts believe that maintaining the status quo is not so much about protecting the values of the Internet as about safeguarding interests, both monetary and hegemonistic. Such an assessment may not be wide of the mark if one joins the dots. Google, says a Bloomberg report of December 10, “avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting $9.8 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company, almost double the total from three years before”. It also said that the French, Italian, British and Australian governments are probing Google’s tax avoidance in its borderless operations.

	What is clear, however, is that a number of countries for reasons springing from different motivations, appear determined to undermine America’s control of the outfits that now define how the Internet works. Although the US maintains that ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is a private, non-profit corporation, it is overseen by the US Commerce Department. According to People’s Daily, what the US spouts about Net freedom is so much humbug. In an August 2012 report, the leading Chinese daily claimed the US “controls and owns all cyberspaces in the world, and other countries can only lease Internet addresses and domain names from the US, leading to American hegemonic monopoly over the world’s Internet”. It also highlighted a fact that has slipped below the radar. During the Iraq invasion, the US government asked ICANN to terminate services to Iraq’s top-level domain name “.iq” and thereafter all websites with the domain name “.iq” disappeared overnight. It charges the US with having “taken advantage of its control over the Internet to launch an invisible war against disobedient countries and to intimidate and threaten other countries”. While this may be true, the irony is that China, with its great firewall of censorship, is in no shape to position itself as a champion of freedom. Like other authoritarian countries, it will do everything to police the Net and control it.

The right of countries and peoples to access the Net was highlighted in Dubai when some African countries raised the issue of US control of the global Internet. Some of these, such as Sudan, have long been complaining about Washington’s sanctions that entail denial of Internet services. ITU officials point out that Resolution 69, first passed in the 2008 meeting, invoked again in 2010 and dusted off once again for the WCIT negotiations, invoked “human rights” to argue for “non-discriminatory access to modern telecom/ ICT facilities, services and applications”. Says Paul Conneally, head of Communications & Partnership Promotion at ITU, “The real target of these resolutions are US sanctions imposed on nations that are deemed bad actors. These sanctions mean that people in those countries—not just the government, mind you, but everyone, innocent and guilty alike—are denied access to Internet services such as Google, Sourceforge, domain name registrars such as GoDaddy, software and services from Oracle, Windows Live Messenger, etc.”

The catalogue of Sudan’s complaints shows at least 27 instances in 2012 when companies from Google to Microsoft and Paypal to Oracle cut off their services to the African country. This might explain why major companies would be opposed to the resolution on a right to access Internet services. Such a right would allow countries to use ITRs to compel them to provide services they might otherwise have preferred not to. But so far all such sanctions appear to have been a decision of the US Administration.

The problem of the digital divide, in fact, did not get the headlines it should have. Africa accounts for just 7 per cent of the 2.4 billion people who use the Net worldwide and penetration in the region is just 15.6 per cent of the population. Compare this with North America where over 78 per cent are linked to the digital world and Touré’s logic about the ITU’s mandate appears reasonable.

When Apple censors the drone war NETIZENS know that the Internet suffers from the depredations of government, hackers and viruses. But not many are aware that companies are as prone to taking legitimate stuff off the Net on the flimsiest grounds. In the case of Apple it could have been misplaced patriotism or plain business sense that prompted it to block an app which monitors drone strike locations in November last year. The App Store rejected the product, calling it “objectionable and crude”. Drones+ (see photo) is an application that simply adds a location to a map every time a drone strike is reported in the media and added to a database maintained by the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Josh Begley, a graduate student at New York University, who developed the app, says it shows no visuals of war or classified information. All it does is to keep its users informed about when and where drone attacks are taking place in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “This is behavior I would expect of a company in a repressive country like China, not an iconic American company in the heart of Silicon Valley,” says a petition to the company CEO. Did Apple’s censorship have anything to do with the fact that it received huge contracts from the Pentagon? US legislators have joined the protests against Apple. The most brazen act of corporate censorship occurred in August 2012 with NASA’s livestream coverage of the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars in the space agency’s $2.5 billion mission. A news agency, Scripps, coolly claimed as its own the public domain video posted on NASA’s official YouTube channel that documented the epic landing (see our opening visuals). “This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds. Sorry about that,” said a message on NASA’s blackened screen. So much for the strict US laws aimed at curbing online piracy!

Touré noted that the revised ITRs would see greater transparency in global roaming charges, lead to “more investment in broadband infrastructure” and help those with disabilities. But he was hopeful that the new treaty signed in Dubai would make it possible for the 4.5 billion people still offline to be connected. “When all these people come online, we hope they will have enough infrastructure and connectivity so that traffic will continue to flow freely,” Touré said.

But should ITU govern the Net? Not in its entirety, according to experts. For one, ITU until the Dubai meeting was far from being transparent and does not allow participation of civil society or other stakeholders in its negotiations unless they are part of the official delegation of the member-states. In fact, even critics of the current system, who think the system is lopsided and hypocritical, believe ITU needs to reform itself and confine to the carrier/infrastructure layer of the Internet. Nor should it get into laying down standards which is done by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the naming and numbering that is managed by ICANN.

But Conneally counters this by asking what would happen if the US decided to deny domain name root zone to Iran because of its bad human rights record. “Suppose it ordered Verisign to remove .IR from the DNS root and make it non-functional. Would we want ICANN/the Internet governance regime to be used as a political/strategic tool to reform Iran? What happens to global interoperability when the core infrastructure gets used in that way?”

Who then should ensure that the Internet is run in a free and open manner? Should it be the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)? But IGF is to be an open consultative forum that cannot by itself govern. It brings in participation for any or all Internet-related policy processes but it by itself was never supposed to do policy or governance.

Parminder Jeet Singh, executive director of ItforChange, says whoever governs is the government for that purpose. “This truism is significant in the present context, because there is an attempt by those who really control/ govern the Internet at present, largely through illegitimate and often surreptitious ways, to confuse issues around Internet governance in all ways possible, including through abuse of established language and political principles and concepts.”

ITforChange is a Bengaluru institution working on information society theory and practice, especially from the standpoint of equity, social justice and gender equality, and it is that perspective which informs Singh’s suggestions. “What we need are safeguards as, for instance, with media regulation. The Internet, of course, is much more than media. It is today one of the most important factors that can and will influence distribution of economic, social and political power. Without regulation it will always be that those who currently dominate it will take away the biggest pie.

Surveillance club

Eight Indian companies are among the 700 members of European Telecommunications Standards Institute. The group works with government and law enforcement agencies to integrate surveillance capabilities into communications infrastructure. It also hosts regular meetings on lawful interception

Wipro Technologies	Associate Service Providers
• HCL Technologies Limited	• Associate Consultancy for Co./Partnership
• Accenture Services Pvt Ltd	• Observers
• CEWiT	• Associate Research Body
• Saankhya Labs Pvt Ltd	• Associate Manufacturers
• Sasken Communication	• Associate Manufacturers
• Technologies
• SmartPlay Technologies	Associate Consultancy for Co./Partnership
• TEJAS NETWORKS LTD	• Associate Manufacturers

Other critics of the current system concede that bringing governments on board, especially authoritarian and statist powers which the digital world threatens, would give them perverse incentives to control it. But this threat should be met not by insisting that the Internet needs no governance or regulation, but by safeguards that ensure equitable access and benefits, Singh stresses.

While the jury is out on the question whether the new ITRs will make any material difference to the way, and if at all, the Net will come under added government oversight and intervention, developments elsewhere show that ITU is not the main threat to digital freedom.

The irony is that while cyber security is contentious in ITU, other international organisations, such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and a clutch of influential telecom industry associations, are pushing for surveillance programmes that ensure policing of a high order with sophisticated infrastructure to monitor online communications. A host of countries already have such systems in place and are pressuring countries like India to fall in line.

A UNODC report, titled ‘The use of the Internet for terrorist purposes’, has detailed how countries can and should use new technology for online surveillance—all in the name of anti-terrorism. The report discusses sensitive issues such as blocking websites and using spyware to bypass encryption and also urges countries to cooperate on an agreed framework for data retention.

At the same time, powerful industry bodies, such as ATIS (Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), are reported to be working with government and law enforcement agencies to integrate surveillance capabilities into communications infrastructure, according to Future Tense, a project which looks at emerging technologies and how these affect society, policy and culture. It says India is under pressure from another industry organisation, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), “to adopt global standards for surveillance”, calling on the country’s government to create a “centralized monitoring system” and “install state-of-the-art legal intercept equipment”.

TIA is a Washington-based trade group which brings together companies such as Nokia, Siemens Networks and Verizon Wireless, and is focused on issues related to electronic surveillance and is developing standards for intercepting VOIP and data retention alongside with ETSI and ATIS. At least seven Indian companies are members of ETSI, which is said to hold international meetings on data interception thrice a year.

Add to this chilling list the International Chamber of Commerce. It is reported to be seeking the establishment of surveillance centre hubs of several countries to help governments intercept communications and obtain data that is stored in cloud servers in foreign jurisdictions. Given this backdrop why are the US and its cohorts creating a ruckus on ITRs?

It would also mean that by focusing on ITRs and ITU as a major threat to Internet freedom civil society may be jousting at windmills.

Malice and freedom of speech

Two suits highlight the challenge of treading between the two

Among the many legal cases in India related to the use and misuse of the world wide web, two stand out for involving web giants and provoking sharp reaction. These are the cases registered in Delhi district courts in December 2011, objecting to chunks of content—portraying prominent political figures and religious places among others in a certain light—hosted on websites. One was filed by a Delhi journalist, Vinai Rai, requesting the court to press criminal charges against 21 web agencies, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo! India. The other, filed by a social activist, M A A Qasmi, was a civil suit requesting action against 22 web agencies. Both mentioned that the content on the websites was inflammatory, threat to national integrity, unacceptable, and created enmity, hatred and communal discord.

A year on, tangible impact has not been much. The number of accused in the civil case has come down to seven web agencies and in the criminal case the government is yet to issue summons to the companies concerned (see ‘The case so far’). However, these litigations are seen as landmarks in the recent history of the Internet and its interaction with societies and governments. The cases—especially off-the-record comments by the judiciary suggesting blanket ban and pre-screening of all content—provoked a debate on the freedom of expression and Indian cyber laws.

The case so far

JANUARY 13, 2012: Delhi High Court dismisses petition by Google and Facebook asking to be absolved of criminal charges filed in district court

JANUARY 20: High Court asks for reply from Delhi Police in response to plea by Yahoo! India challenging district court summons

FEBRUARY 16: Court refuses to stay proceedings against Facebook and Google but allows them to be represented by counsel

MARCH: Court dismisses criminal charges against Yahoo! India and Microsoft but says the charges can be revived if new evidence comes to light. Sets aside summons

Malicious content exists on the web and may even need to be taken down, but the laws used to remove malicious content can also be used to curb political speech, thus, infringing on the right to freedom of expression, says Prasanth Sugathan, senior advocate with Software Freedom Law Centre, an international network of lawyers.

Some like Pranesh Prakash of non-profit Centre for Internet and Society believe the IT Rules are at odds with the IT Act and give powers for censorship. He explains that the IT Act, 2000, provides for protection of intermediaries; web browsers, social networking sites and websites cannot be held responsible for what a third party publishes on their forums—“similar to the way in which we cannot sue a telephone agency or a post office for someone else making use of these platforms to harass or defame another person”. But the IT rules of 2011 watered down this protection.

Supreme Court advocate and cyber law expert Pavan Duggal explains how. The Act states once a complaint is made against certain content, the web agency hosting it must notify the person who put up the content, verify the content and judge whether it needs to be removed. But the rules state that once the web agency is notified it must remove the content within 36 hours or it could be prosecuted for not acting on the complaint. The rules have gone beyond the Act’s scope, especially vis-a-vis privacy and data protection, leaving no scope for hearing out the accused, he says.

The disjunct between the Act and the rules is being contested in various spheres, including Parliament. But there is a bright side too. Duggal believes the cases have brought pertinent issues, like free speech and privacy concerns, into the public domain. Ramanjeet Chima, policy adviser for Google, says freedom of expression is paramount for Google but the recognition of local sentiments is also being given equal weightage.

Senior advocate Sidharth Luthra, who was representing Facebook in the Delhi High Court, wonders whether the existing Indian laws are in tune with the ever-changing online world. Unwilling to comment on the case, he says the law is limited in its scope, while technology is not. Refusing to comment on the cases, the Google adviser emphasised the need to use the existing provisions of big web agencies to address grievances regarding content.

The Internet “is not the wild wild west”; all content, users and viewers can be traced, Duggal cautions. Since the Internet can impact political issues government is increasingly looking for ways to control it. “There is no ideal solution but it is evident that some monitoring and regulation are required, and in all parts of the world all regimes are in the process of addressing this,” he says.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/down-to-earth-latha-jishnu-dinsa-sachan-moyna-january-15-2013-clash-of-the-cyber-worlds

‘Mobile’ voters may sway polls

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T11:55:24Z

BABALAL Patel’s tiny tea stall in Mumbai is a long way from Silicon Valley. It is not even that close to Bangalore, the Indian equivalent.

The article by Avantika Chilkoti was published in BDlive on March 5, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

But one night this month, this ramshackle shop became the venue for a social media experiment that highlights the hi-tech face of electioneering in India, the world’s largest democracy. A crowd gathered outside to watch two television screens showing a live broadcast with politician Narendra Modi as he answered questions the audience submitted by text message.

Similar "tea parties" were held across India, designed to ram home Modi’s humble background as a tea seller and his technological credentials. The nationwide event, organised by using mobile technology more commonly seen in US presidential campaigns, signals a shift in Indian politics.

For decades, political campaigns in India have centred around colossal rallies and billboard advertising. But a growing population of young people, rising internet use and the ubiquity of cellphones mean this year’s battle is playing out equally fiercely online.

"We are moving far ahead of saying that we are building ‘likes’ on social media," says Arvind Gupta, head of information technology and social media for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

"Organisation is being done using digital. So if I’m going to tell everybody there’s an event tomorrow, it can be posted on Facebook, websites, on SMS, on WhatsApp, though the real meeting is happening on the ground."

These techniques, which became familiar during the Arab uprisings of North Africa, are an increasingly important part of communication strategy ahead of a national election that must be held in the next three months, and of which the outcome many believe will be close.

Gupta believes parties are fighting what he calls a "postmodern election" for up to 160 — largely urban — seats out of a total of 543. More than half the 50-strong team working on communications for the BJP are dedicated to digital campaigning.

India’s internet user base reached a point of inflection last year, exceeded 200-million. While that is a fraction of the 1.3-billion population, prompting many to question the power of social media, use is far greater among urban and young voters, millions of whom will be eligible to vote for the first time.

"Social media is suddenly becoming important, not for all constituencies, but for urban constituencies, because for the first time the urban youth and the educated class are very much glued into the election and showing interest," says Rajeeva Karandikar, a statistician and election analyst.

Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, has adapted particularly quickly to the changing environment. He captured the public imagination by using holograms to address rallies and Google Hangouts to interact with the diaspora. He has 3.4-million Twitter followers and more than 10.6-million "likes" on his Facebook page, thanks in part to a slick social media team led by high-profile technology entrepreneurs.

By contrast, Rahul Gandhi, the reticent, undeclared candidate for the incumbent Congress party, does not even have a verified Twitter account.

Some were disappointed by low attendance at the national "tea parties", but the events were lauded for being interactive and, perhaps most important in a country where newspaper readership remains high, grabbed column inches in the press. The audience could speak directly to Modi at venues with a two-way video link and the footage was immediately available on YouTube.

"While answering each question, Modi has a point of view," says Pratik Patel, 28, a chartered accountant who organised the event at his grandfather’s tea shop. "He doesn’t have two ways of looking at the same thing — this helps him to be more decisive and forward thinking."

Social media provide swathes of information to India’s political parties, as they copy the sophisticated data analysis used by US President Barack Obama’s campaigns.

From its offices in suburban Mumbai, digital marketing group Pinstorm tracks social media discussions at constituency level and identifies significant supporters or critics. It describes the service as an early warning system or "social radar", which allows parties to mobilise workers rapidly to oppose or support a point of view.

Sceptics argue, however, that social media have insufficient traction in India to affect results of the coming poll. But the size of the user base does not reflect its full power. Educated, influential Indians use these digital networks and the online debate shapes views in traditional media that reach a wider audience.

"The theory is that since the elites are connected and have more time to spare on social media, let us use social media and the internet more generally to influence discourse through these elites," says Sunil Abraham, executive director for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. "It’s an indirect route to the vote."

However, an adviser to the Obama campaign warns that, given differences in funding and the environment, India’s politicians should be wary of using the US presidential race as a model. This year, a simpler technology may prove the best tool for campaigns in India: the cellphone.

"Folks look to the Obama campaign for this sort of stuff," says Ethan Roeder, who worked on data for the 2008 and 2012 US presidential campaigns. "But a lot of these international campaigns would do best looking elsewhere for a model.… No campaign in the history of the world has ever spent that much money to elect a single individual to a single office."

India’s version is markedly cheaper, thanks to the roadside chai wallahs and armies of volunteers, pulling in the new breed of voters.

"I have never attended a political rally in my entire life," says Patel, who helped to organise Modi’s nationwide "tea party". "If people want to connect with me they need to connect with me on social media or via e-mail."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bd-live-avantika-chilkoti-march-5-2014-mobile-voters-may-sway-polls

Girls just wanna have... a voice

praskrishna — 2014-04-01T11:21:47Z

Many Indian women have taken to Twitter, the micro-blogging site, to air their views. And some of them have become social media celebrities by virtue of their wise and witty tweets. Prasun Chaudhuri looks at the women who matter in India’s Twitterverse.

The article was published in the Telegraph on March 8, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Everyone knows that movie stars like Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone, media celebs like Barkha Dutt and Sagarika Ghose have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media who hang on to their every word. But Malini Agarwal, Priyanka Sachar? Vidyut Kale? You may not have heard of them otherwise, but these women are rockstars of India’s Twitterverse too — not because they are famous in their day jobs, but because their tweets have that special something that keeps the followers coming.

Take Malini Agarwal (@MissMalini), a former radio jockey and head of digital content for Channel V in India, who has over 2,00,000 followers on Twitter. In fact, she has a larger-than-life presence on virtually all social media platforms. Agarwal tweets about Bollywood, the fashion world and the Page 3 circuit. Her Twitter bio says: “She who controls the spice, controls the universe. Bollywood, Fashion & Lifestyle with a Desi Girl Twist.” This “desi girl” with the insider’s take on the glamour world is now an industry of sorts. She has her own website called missmalini.com in which she has employed nine enthusiastic young bloggers — “a happy mix of Bollywood Junkies, Fashionistas and Party Animals” representing “the young, modern (and pretty!) face of India”.

Far removed from the glamour circuit is Vidyut Kale (@Vidyut), a stay-at-home mom raising an infant with cerebral palsy. She has over 14,000 followers for her unusual takes on “issues of socio-political interest”. Says Kale, who describes herself as an “intellectual anarchist”, “Twitter is just amazing because I can actually comment on something and get instant replies. I think I get followed mainly because I say what many will tiptoe around, and that can feel like a big relief when an issue is bugging you badly.”

Her “firebrand” tweeting — on women’s issues, politics, and indeed, pretty much everything under the sun — has turned her into quite a celebrity and she often gets invited to speak at events. Even though she avoids most of these “real-life” gatherings, sometimes her fans force her to attend them. She says, “I have been paid travel expenses to attend an event when I said I couldn’t afford the travel. I have been interviewed, I have had people make an effort to understand a [social] cause if I bring it up.”

Clearly, a social media platform like Twitter has become a fantastic forum for women — a section of society that has traditionally been voiceless. Those who shine on it, says Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society (a Bangalore-based organisation that researches the impact of digital media), do so by virtue of their “authentic voice”. He adds, “Unlike in the traditional media, there’s no editor to moderate their views and they don’t have any guidelines to follow.” In other words, what their fans get to read or see are unfiltered views — something that’s often missing in mainstream media. Besides, their tweets are often edgy and politically incorrect. And men — and women — fed on the traditional image of women propagated by the mainstream media, find that refreshing and engaging.

Adds social media enthusiast and avid blogger Harsh Ajmera, “People appreciate the bold and politically incorrect approach of these Twitter stars, as opposed to the sugar-coated comments aired in news channels and various other media outlets.” Agrees Kale, “Unlike in lengthy blog posts or newspaper columns, it is easier to make comments on news or challenge views through Twitter. It also enables direct interaction with readers.”

Ask Chinmayi Sripada (@chinmayi), a Chennai-based singer whose bold and frank tweets have earned her more than 2,40,000 Twitter followers. And a fair number of trolls and abusive enemies too. When she spoke out in support of Tamil Nadu fishermen who were attacked by the Sri Lankan Navy, she was flooded with abusive tweets that were tantamount to sexual harassment. But she took on her abusers (one of them was a professor at a top fashion institute) head on. “I filed a case under Section 66A of the IT Act and they were in jail for about two weeks. That was when I saw the full extent of cyber bullying on the basis of caste and community.”

Of course, Sripada doesn’t owe her fame to Twitter alone. She is a popular playback singer in south India and got famous across India for her recent Bollywood hit in Chennai Express. “I haven’t become famous because of social media. I am recognised primarily as a singer.”

Actress and former Miss India Gul Panag (@GulPanag) is yet another Twitter star who was already a celebrity. But with a staggering 7,84,000 followers, and with tweets that are unfailingly sharp and intelligent, maybe her Twitter stardom outshines her Bollywood one. A recent survey by an agency named her as one of the most influential persons on the micro-blogging site. News anchor Barkha Dutt — one of the country’s top media celebrities — also boasts a whopping 12.3 lakh followers.

But Kaveri Ahuja (@ikaveri) is a regular wife and mom who has gone on to become a Twitter celeb. A cancer survivor, her takes on everyday life and the stories of her battle against colorectal cancer (“I love a good fight. How else would I have kicked the big C’s butt?”) attract over 25,000 followers. She even runs a separate Twitter handle for her fan club (@ikaverifc). “Being recognised on Twitter has expanded my offline social circle as well. I can count many online friends as my real-life friends now,” she says.

One of India’s earliest Twitter stars was Priyanka Sachar. If her real name doesn’t ring a bell, her Twitter handle, @TwilightFairy, might. This erstwhile IT professional and part-time wedding photographer left her day job riding on the fame earned by her 140-character tweets. Her quirky takes on a wide range of topics — ranging from everyday outrages (“Bought passionfruit cake for parents’ anniversary from jaypeehotels and got long human hair baked in it for free. Never again!”) to instant reaction to news (“Sahara boss gets ink on his face. Reminds me of school time ink pen wars!”) — are lapped up by her 21,000+ followers.

Thanks to her fame on Twitter, she is often recognised by strangers. “It is a strange experience and I really don’t know how to react, except to say ‘yes, that’s me, how did you know!’… Twitter has made sure that so many interesting (and seemingly inaccessible) people are accessible instantly.” Apart from these “life-altering changes”, she keeps getting invited to some activity or the other, organised by brands that regularly invite “influencers”. “The recognition on Twitter/social media has affected me in massive ways. I left my IT industry job in order to figure out if I can take up a different profession and be a freelancer. And the moment I left my job, an opportunity landed straight in my lap, simply because of my Twitter id! I got offered a job as a social media consultant at a digital media agency,” she says.
So have social media platforms such as Twitter really done wonders for women’s empowerment? Yes and no.

According to Sachar, Twitter did offer unprecedented freedom of speech in its early days. But now that a lot of politicians and political parties have come on board and the Indian IT laws are being tweaked, tweets can be misused by anyone in power. “Even though one can say what one wants, people do tread a tad more cautiously compared to, let’s say, two year back,” says Sachar.

Chinmayi agrees. “There is nothing called total freedom of speech. Even if one chooses that path, the trolls are waiting to see who can be cut to size. I am guarded about what I write on social media.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/telegraphindia-march-8-2014-girls-just-wanna-have-a-voice

The politics of Facebook

praskrishna — 2014-04-03T11:30:51Z

With the social media becoming an important political battleground, is Facebook affecting friendships and trying to influence our political leanings?

The article by Shweta Tiwari was published in Livemint on April 1, 2014. Dr. Nishant Shah is quoted.

When social activist Uthara Narayanan, 32, posted an innocuous article link on the Gujarat riots on Facebook in January, she was in for a surprise. An old friend from college fiercely defended Gujarat chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, getting abrasive and personal in the post. “I had known her for more than 14 years and yet hadn’t seen this side to her,” says Narayanan. “I didn’t realize when she had gone off and gotten such strong views on the debate.”

From then on Narayanan decided to stay away from her friend though they live in the same city. “It left a bad taste in my mouth and marred our friendship for me, though I am still Facebook friends with her.” Almost as if agreeing with her, Facebook’s wall automatically started keeping her friend’s posts away from her wall—thanks to the EdgeRank algorithm.

Like-like stick together

EdgeRank, the Facebook algorithm that decides which posts to show in your newsfeed, bases its decision on three factors: an affinity score between the user and the one who’s created the post, the type of post (comment, like, create or tag), and time lapsed since it was created. The first basically means that you will see posts from friends you have interacted with and like to interact with on the social network.

In January, Catherine Grevet, a PhD student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, studied this algorithm in the light of politics and concluded that people tend to get attracted to circles of friends who affirm to their own political leanings, all because of Facebook’s algorithms. “People are mainly friends with those who share similar values and interests,” Grevet wrote in the study. “As a result, they aren’t exposed to opposing viewpoints.” Grevet presented the study at the 17th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in the US in February.

Alok Sharma, a Mumbai-based creative writer who used to be a political cartoonist, says social media has led to Indians opening up. “We are taught to be a little politically correct, especially in face-to-face conversations. But when it comes to social networking sites, Indians express their views like fanatics,” he says. He blocked a couple of Facebook friends after a spate of personal comments on one of his posts. “My friends know me and get the crux of what I might be trying to say in a thread but there are others who are on my Friends list but don’t understand the context and take it all wrong.”

The misunderstanding arises because many of us post on the network as we would speak among friends and not as we would say things in public. “Facebook is not a community, a clique or a group of friends,” says Nishant Shah, director of research at Bangalore-based non-profit The Centre for Internet and Society. “It is just a network,” he says. That means that not all people on your Facebook list are friends—you are just connected to them on the network. You might have a professional relationship with them, be teammates or acquaintances or colleagues, but you don’t know them personally. Given that the average Facebook user has 229 Facebook friends—according to the numbers from US think tank Pew Research Center’s Internet Project which tracks statistics about the social network—that’s just too many people to even know personally.

“The audience on the social network is much larger than the friend list, including Facebook itself, which, if it finds your comment problematic, will censor even before a complaint is produced,” says Shah. A post on Facebook or a comment or a like, can get you in trouble not just with other individuals or communities who take offence but even the law, as happened to a girl in 2012 who put up a post criticizing the shutdown of Mumbai after the death of Shiv Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray.

“Though used like it, Facebook is not a conversation,” says Shah, “Because everything you write is archived and recorded. And can be used against you if need be.”

A medium to shout in

But would you shout at a stranger on the street as you do on Facebook? Basav Biradar, a programme manager based in Bangalore, actively posts on politics and comments on Facebook. He feels most people on Facebook give strong opinions that are not well-informed. “A lot of these opinions are dependent on propaganda and campaigns rather than facts. Why don’t people do some homework before forming an opinion?” With over 100 million Indians active on the social network, however, an uninformed opinion is hardly reason to stop anyone from posting, commenting, liking, offending and getting offended through posts on Facebook.

Shah calls this phenomenon cyber-bullying in politics. “Specific vocal and passionate groups and communities have emerged who silence any voice of dissent or critique by trolling the dissident,” says Shah. “They do not need anonymity. They don’t try to hide who they are. They feel so empowered by the backing of the politicos who are either hiring or supporting them, that they have risen in hordes and are stifling the space for dissent and questioning even more effectively than they have been able to do in real life.”

It’s almost like standing in a rally and hearing a swarm of slogans. Sashi Kumar, chairman of the trust Media Development Foundation that runs the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, gives a similar analogy. He believes that the language of communication on Facebook is not written but oral. “Writing implies a well thought through opinion, whereas speech is responsive and involved. Within the Internet, there’s a strange morphing of written form which is expressed in a way of oral communication. You speak to someone on Facebook, you respond, you hear, you react, you communicate, you talk.” He says that this morphing is leading society back to more oral forms of communication where written forms like newspapers will be a thing of the past.

Replacing traditional media

	With surprising events like the support for Jan Lokpal law, Pink Chaddi campaign and even the backlash against the December 2012 gang rape case in Delhi, social media seems to have somewhere, somehow made all of us more participative, more aware and more active in political and social spaces. Most politicians have active Twitter and Facebook accounts. Most newspapers and even news channels quote their feed as statements when summing up news. Social networks have become almost mainstream. So much so that when earlier in March Modi attacked Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar at a political rally in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, Kumar’s response was detailed, and through a Facebook post.

With surprising events like the support for Jan Lokpal law, Pink Chaddi campaign and even the backlash against the December 2012 gang rape case in Delhi, social media seems to have somewhere, somehow made all of us more participative, more aware and more active in political and social spaces.

Most politicians have active Twitter and Facebook accounts. Most newspapers and even news channels quote their feed as statements when summing up news. Social networks have become almost mainstream. So much so that when earlier in March Modi attacked Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar at a political rally in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, Kumar’s response was detailed, and through a Facebook post.

A joint study by the IRIS Knowledge Foundation, a public service initiative of business and financial information provider IRIS Business Services Pvt. Ltd, and the industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India, suggests that social media use is now sufficiently widespread to influence the outcome of the next general election and consequently government formation. The March research, which studied Facebook’s own data, claims that among the social media spaces, Facebook users have the maximum clout.

Kumar agrees and feels that news now is more user-generated: “It’s the people who want to pursue their own news, know more about their own news, create news. In a way it democratizes journalism. People are talking more about issues, giving opinions and comparing notes. Politics has shifted from the streets to these social medias.”

The future holds more participation, and a sense of being a stakeholder in the political process. An “enlarging of political participation”, as Kumar puts it. “Of course because everyone has a mike, a mouthpiece now, there will be lot of more trivial conversation and hairsplitting which might not add up to anything, but the important thing is that people are engaging themselves politically. We are on the streets. All because of technology.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-april-1-2014-shweta-taneja-the-politics-of-facebook