The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
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Religious pluralism and freedom of expression in India, Europe and other countries
https://cis-india.org/news/resetdoc-october-10-2013-religious-pluralism-and-freedom-of-expression-in-india-europe-other-countries
<b>The Venice-Delhi Seminars are Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations project, in cooperation with the Jamia Millia Islamia, Seminar and the India Habitat Centre is organizing this event from October 10 to 12, 2013. Chinmayi Arun will be speaking at this event.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.resetdoc.org/news/00000000104">Click to read</a> the full details published by Reset DOC on October 10, 2013.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This year, the Rome-based international association <a href="http://www.resetdoc.org/EN/index">Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations</a> will continue promoting dialogue between cultures and the culture of dialogue, reciprocal awareness between East and West and valorising the cultural, religious and political differences in a globalized world.<br /><br />The schedule for autumn 2013 is as follows; the next <b>Venice-Delhi Seminars</b> will take place from October 10 to 12 in Delhi with the participation of the Indian magazine <i>Seminar</i>, and <i>Jamia Millia Islamia,</i> the Islamic University of Delhi and the <i>India Habitat Centre</i>. After the first meeting in the Indian capital in October 2010 on the subject “<b><i>Minorities and Pluralism</i></b><i>”</i> (see <a href="http://www.india-seminar.com/2011/621.htm"><i>Seminar</i> 621, 2011</a>) and a <a href="http://www.resetdoc.org/news/00000000089">second meeting</a> in Venice at the Giorgio Cini Foundation from October 18 to 20, 2012, dedicated to “<b><i>Cultural differences in times of economic turbulence. Social tensions, cultural conflicts and policies of integration in Europe and India</i></b>”, the Venice-Delhi Seminars have become a regular event, with one being held in Venice and the next in Delhi.<br /><b><br />Pluralism</b><br /><br />The project’s general framework is <b>religious and cultural pluralism</b>, seen through the perspective analysis of social and political processes and exchanges between East and West. Every encounter is an opportunity to deepen political, social and economic trends that run through society, like India’s and, increasingly, European society, where cultural, ethnic and political differences coexist and interact. Each meeting consists of <b>five sessions lasting three days</b> and papers presented by by experts and academics from all over the world attending roundtable discussions dedicated to the analysis of policies relating to minorities and the global challenge of the multi-ethnic composition of our societies.<br /><br />The proceedings and more articles from our 2012 edition in Venice, Italy, are published in the September 2013 issue of Seminar magazine. You can visit its website here: <a href="http://www.india-seminar.com">www.india-seminar.com</a><b><br /><br />10-12 October 2013 – Third Venice-Delhi Seminars</b><i><br /></i><i>Coexistence and mutual respect, rights to be protected, freedom of speech and freedom of worship, blasphemy, the ethics of responsibility</i><b><span><br /><br /></span></b>The third Venice-Delhi Seminars will take place from October 10 to 12, 2013 in Delhi and will be dedicated to three days of study on the subject “<b><i>Religious Pluralism and Freedom of Expression in India and Europe: Coexistence and Mutual Respect, Rights to Protect, Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Worship, Blasphemy, Ethics of Responsibility</i></b>”. The objective of this second round of the “Plural Future” project will be to critically examine the growing tension between the democratic need to protect differences and the right to freedom of expression and the vital need for modern democracies to guarantee peaceful coexistence between majorities and minorities, as well as freedom of worship in conditions of cultural and religious pluralism protected from the extremist excesses of demands based on ethnicity and identity. We will therefore also analyze the public visibility of radical and extremist tendencies from the United States to Europe, to Muslim-majority countries and India. <br /><br />Analysis will take place from a perspective paying particular attention to the manner in which this wave of violent opposition to dialogue and cultural differences challenges liberal democratic order, tested by a new need to implement rights and respect of minorities. Specific importance will be attributed to conditions experienced by Muslim and Christian minorities. The subject of respect between communities and the rights of minorities will be analyzed also in the European context. European, Indian and American scholars will attend.<br /><br />Particular attention will paid to <b>the media</b> in this 2013 edition, and its role in portraying cultural and religious differences as well as its capacity to encourage or prevent the development of peaceful co-existence and an acceptance of differences in conditions of cultural, religious and ethnic pluralism.<br /><br />The Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations project has been organised also so as to involve a large number of students, graduates and doctoral students.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/resetdoc-october-10-2013-religious-pluralism-and-freedom-of-expression-in-india-europe-other-countries'>https://cis-india.org/news/resetdoc-october-10-2013-religious-pluralism-and-freedom-of-expression-in-india-europe-other-countries</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet Governance2013-11-08T05:54:06ZNews ItemYou will need a license to create a WhatsApp group in Kashmir
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/governance-now-april-19-2016-you-will-need-a-license-to-create-whatsapp-group-in-kashmir
<b>The internet rights activists have criticised the move stating it as unconstitutional.</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.governancenow.com/news/regular-story/you-may-need-a-license-in-kashmir-run-a-whatsapp-group">published by Governance Now</a> on April 19, 2016. Pranesh Prakash tweeted on this.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Moving beyond internet ban, Kashmir’s Kupwara district issued a notice asking all admins of WhatsApp news groups to register their groups with the district authority within ten days.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With this move, the authorities are taking power in their hands to monitor WhatsApp news groups owned by private individuals. However, internet rights activists criticised it saying the move is unconstitutional as it breaches freedom of speech.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The circular is issued under the subject of ‘registering of WhatsApp news group and restrictions for spreading rumours thereof’. The district magistrate said that any spread of information by these WhatsApp news groups, “leading to untoward incidents will be dealt under the law”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">You may need a license in Kashmir to run a WhatsApp group</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/WhatsApp.jpg" alt="WhatsApp" class="image-inline" title="WhatsApp" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The valley witnessed five-day internet shutdown following the Handwara firing incident. Internet ban is a common phenomenon in Kashmir. <br /><br /> “For how long will the government decide whether we can communicate with each other or not? Actually, the authorities do not want us to spread the truth about the army’s atrocities far and wide,” said a resident of Handwara as quoted in Kashmir Reader.<br /><br /> Earlier, parts of Haryan and Gujarat also witnessed internet ban during Jat and Patidar agitation, respectively.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://www.governancenow.com/gov-next/egov/hard-broad-ban-internet-haryana-jat-agitation" target="_blank"><span>Blocking all internet access </span></a>is clearly an unnecessary and disproportionate measure that cannot be countenanced as a ‘reasonable restriction’ on freedom of expression and the right to seek and receive information, which is an integral part of the freedom of expression,” said Pranesh Prakash.<br /><br /> For instance, he adds, a riot-affected woman seeking to find out the address of the nearest hospital cannot do so on her phone. “Instead of blocking access to the internet, the government should seek to quell rumours by using social networks to spread the truth, and by using social networks to warn potential rioters of the consequences,” he said. <br /><br /> Former Mumbai police commissioner Rakesh Maria used WhatsApp to counter rumours spread after circulation of a fake photo in January 2015. <br /><br /> “The way in which the ban is imposed is unreasonable. Problem is in the method that is being used in absence of guidelines, defining circumstances under which they can impose a restriction on internet sites,” says Arun Kumar, head of cyber initiatives at Observer Research Foundation (ORF). <br /><br /> If government formulates these rules or guidelines it will set a threshold for state or central authorities, which will define the urgency of imposing ban on internet services.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/governance-now-april-19-2016-you-will-need-a-license-to-create-whatsapp-group-in-kashmir'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/governance-now-april-19-2016-you-will-need-a-license-to-create-whatsapp-group-in-kashmir</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial MediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet GovernanceCensorshipWhatsApp2016-04-21T02:34:46ZNews ItemHackers Take Protest to Indian Streets and Cyberspace
https://cis-india.org/news/hackers-take-protest-to-indian-streets-and-cyberspace
<b>First there was self-styled Gandhian activist Anna Hazare who took to the streets to protest corruption. Now a group agitating against censorship on the Internet has arrived in India.</b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/06/08/hackers-take-protest-to-indian-streets-and-cyberspace/">This article by Shreya Shah was published in the Wall Street Journal on June 8, 2012 </a>Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this article.</p>
<p>Only this time, the location is cyberspace and their modus operandi hacking.</p>
<p>In the last few months, Anonymous –a group of hackers, or hacktivists as they like to call themselves –has gone after Web sites of political parties, government sites and Internet service providers, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/article3496968.ece">the latest being MTNL</a>, to protest censorship on the Internet.</p>
<p>The group says they are opposing laws including the 2008 Information Technology (Amendment) Act and the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules of 2011, which they say unfairly restrict Internet freedom.</p>
<p>On Saturday, the hackers will take their protest to the streets, with an Occupy Wall Street-style march called ”Operation Occupy India” planned in 17 cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Indore in Madhya Pradesh, Nagpur in Maharashtra and Kundapur in Karnataka. The group has requested all protestors to wear Guy Fawkes masks, the symbol of Anonymous.</p>
<p>“This time the common man wants to help us,” an “anon,” which is what members of the group call themselves, told India Real Time.</p>
<p>Anonymous, which has a global presence, catapulted to fame with its <a class="external-link" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704457604576011873881591338.html">attacks on Visa, Mastercard and Paypal</a>.</p>
<p>This is how the group attacks Web sites: It overwhelms them with thousands of requests from different computer systems simultaneously. The Web site is unable to handle the load and crashes.</p>
<p>The group intensified its attacks after Internet Service Providers like Reliance, MTNL and Airtel temporarily <a class="external-link" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/05/18/vimeo-ban-more-web-censorship/">blocked file sharing sites like Vimeo</a>, Dailymotion, Patebin and Pirate bay, citing a Court order.</p>
<p>But many question the method used by Anonymous.</p>
<p>“I don’t believe in defacing or hacking government Web sites to prove a point,” says Ankit Fadia, a cyber security expert. “You can’t hold the government ransom,” he adds.</p>
<p>In an <a class="external-link" href="http://opindia.posterous.com/open-letter-from-anonymous-to-government-of-i">open letter</a> to the government, Anonymous India defended its actions. It wrote that traditional ways of protesting are losing meaning and this is a new method to pressure the politicians.</p>
<p>Members of the group say that like a regular protest on the street, they too block the infrastructure of their opponents. Except in this case, the infrastructure is located in cyberspace.</p>
<p>This is a “geek method of attacking,” said the anon who spoke to India Real Time. The group does not plan to attacks sites like that of the Indian railways, for instance, which is used by the masses, he explained.</p>
<p>But not everyone is convinced.</p>
<p>The group attacked the Web site of India’s Supreme Court even when it says it does not attack Web sites used by the common man, says Pranesh Prakash, Program Director of the Center for Internet and Society.</p>
<p>The IT Act is another reason Anonymous is protesting. The Act gives the government the power to remove content it finds offensive. The government can also restrict public access to a Web site.</p>
<p>Anonymous is also protesting the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mit.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR314E_10511%281%29.pdf">Intermediary Guidelines of 2011</a>. According to this Act, a site that hosts offensive content will have to remove it within 36 hours of a complaint against it.</p>
<p>As a result, Web sites like Google and Facebook are <a class="external-link" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304746604577381791461076660.html%20%20%E2%80%9CThis%20government%20does%20not%20stand%20for%20censorship;%20this%20government%20does%20not%20stand%20for%20infringement%20of%20fr">facing criminal cases</a> for hosting objectionable content on their site.</p>
<p>“This government does not stand for censorship; this government does not stand for infringement of free speech. Indeed, this government does not stand for regulation of free speech,” Kapil Sibal, the Communications and Information Technology Minister told the Rajya Sabha, or the upper house of the Indian Parliament, last month.</p>
<p>Pranesh Prakash, of the Center for Internet and Society told India Real Time that he does not believe that Anonymous will influence policy makers. He says that the main aim of a protest is to get media attention, and in turn get the attention of the people.</p>
<p>But he agrees that India’s cyber laws are “hopelessly flawed” and create a framework by which not only the government but <a class="external-link" href="http://kafila.org/2012/01/11/invisible-censorship-how-the-government-censors-without-being-seen-pranesh-prakash/">everyone can censor</a>.</p>
<p>He adds, “The laws are a greater threat than Anonymous.”</p>
<p>Photo Source: Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/hackers-take-protest-to-indian-streets-and-cyberspace'>https://cis-india.org/news/hackers-take-protest-to-indian-streets-and-cyberspace</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-06-18T04:02:21ZNews ItemAnonymous joins protests against Internet shutdown in Kashmir
https://cis-india.org/news/economic-times-feb-12-2013-indu-nandakumar-anonymous-joins-protests-against-internet-shutdown-in-kashmir
<b>Hacktivist group Anonymous joined thousands of others to protest the shutdown of internet services in Kashmir for the fourth consecutive day by authorities after the hanging of Afzal Guru, a key accused in the Parliament attack case.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indu Nandakumar's article was <a class="external-link" href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-02-12/news/37059201_1_twitter-accounts-guy-fawkes-masks-internet-services">published in the Economic Times</a> on February 12, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Anonymous, which shot to fame in India after it brought down the websites of the <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Supreme%20Court">Supreme Court</a> and <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Congress%20Party">Congress Party</a> last year, on Tuesday expressed its support to the people of Kashmir until the ban on internet and media services are lifted.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"We stand with # Kashmiras it comes to the end of its 3rd day under curfew. The comms blockade will fall. We are with you. # KashmirNow," a message posted on one of the <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Twitter">Twitter</a> accounts of Anonymous read.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another Twitter account of the same group said, "#OpKashmir - Lift the media and internet blackout in #Kashmir".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mobile internet services were suspended across Kashmir Valley on Saturday after the hanging of <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Afzal%20Guru">Afzal Guru</a> in New Delhi. Online protests gathered steam by evening and thousands took to Twitter to express their anger censorships and blockades.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A senior official from the Department of Telecom, which had last year ordered the blocking of several Twitter accounts and websites, said internet services were blocked to avoid any further escalation of violence in Kashmir. But internet experts said a ban of communication services do not result in peace, instead it curtails the basic right of citizens to exchange messages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Government can ban certain class of messages and certain class of users, but definitely not a blanket ban of all services," said <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Sunil%20Abraham">Sunil Abraham</a>, <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/executive%20director">executive director</a> of Bangalore-based research organisation, the <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Centre%20for%20Internet">Centre for Internet</a> and Society.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Essential commodities such as medicines, newspapers etc too are in short supply in Kashmir, where three people died and over 50 were injured in clashes since Saturday.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Anonymous has also been posting photographs from the region. One of the Twitter accounts of the group, @ anon_warlockon Tuesday tweeted, "A gag has been put on everything, information at best is trickling down".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Last year, Anonymous, known for its use of <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Guy%20Fawkes">Guy Fawkes</a> masks, had organised rallies across Indian cities to protest internet censorship after India's <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Department%20of%20Telecom">Department of Telecom</a> blocked over 250 websites and 30 Twitter accounts for posting communal images and videos that led to people from Northeast exit Bangalore and a few other Indian cities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Internet service providers in the Valley were asked by officials in the <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Ministry%20of%20Home%20Affairs">Ministry of Home Affairs</a> to switch off connectivity on Saturday morning. There has been no further communication from the Ministry until now and we don't expect any withdrawal in the next few days," a senior industry executive with direct knowledge of the matter told ET. He added that any decision on withdrawal of the ban will be taken only after the MHA and intelligence officials take stock of the situation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Centre of Internet's Abraham said he was not sure if messages on social media were being taken seriously by the government. "Research shows that during the times of public disruption, ban of communication services will only make things worse. <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Enlightened">Enlightened</a> governments should know this and act accordingly."</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/economic-times-feb-12-2013-indu-nandakumar-anonymous-joins-protests-against-internet-shutdown-in-kashmir'>https://cis-india.org/news/economic-times-feb-12-2013-indu-nandakumar-anonymous-joins-protests-against-internet-shutdown-in-kashmir</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet GovernanceCensorship2013-03-01T04:46:06ZNews ItemOnline Abuse of Teen Girls in Kashmir Leads to Arrests
https://cis-india.org/news/ny-times-feb-8-2013-betwa-sharma-online-abuse-of-teen-girls-in-kashmir-leads-to-arrests
<b>Online abuse and a fatwa aimed at a rock band of Muslim teenage girls in Kashmir have led to arrests and a threat of a lawsuit. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This article by Betwa Sharma was <a class="external-link" href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/online-abuse-of-teen-girls-in-kashmir-leads-to-arrests/">published</a> in the New York Times on February 8, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Three men were arrested this week for posting threatening messages on the Facebook page of Praagaash, an amateur rock band in Indian-occupied Kashmir made of up Muslim girls. “The investigation is ongoing,” said Manoj Pandita, spokesman for the Jammu and Kashmir police, indicating that more arrests may follow.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The three men were charged under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which applies to “offensive” messages being sent through communication services, and Section 506 of the Ranbir Penal Code, which applies to criminal intimidation. Mr. Pandita said that it had been easy to track the I.P. addresses of the Facebook users.<span id="more-55629"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A prominent human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, is planning to sue the top religious leader in Kashmir, who called for the fatwa, for “demonizing Kashmir before the international community” and for “running a parallel judicial system in the valley.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mr. Imroz told India Ink that human rights organizations like his needed support from the international community to highlight their concerns, and such fatwas reflected badly on the Kashmiri society. “He is diverting attention away from real issues of human rights to nonissues like music and purdah,” Mr. Imroz said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The fatwa against the band was issued by the Grand Mufti Bashiruddin Ahmad.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In his fatwa, Mr. Ahmad advised women to only sing inside the house to other female members of the family, and wear a veil whenever they left the house. “They must stay within limits,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Following the band’s first live performance in December, Aneeqa Khalid, Noma Nazir and Farah Deeba, 10th-grade students who are 15 and 16 years old, became the target of abuse and threats on Facebook by people who accused them of being un-Islamic because they had performed in public, especially before men. <a href="https://plus.google.com/photos/112765019253836299953/albums/5839954496440638817" target="_blank">Some commenters</a> called them “sluts” and “prostitutes;” others suggested that they should be raped.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The band Praagaash, which means “darkness into light,” <a href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/muslim-girls-quit-rock-band-after-national-controversy/" target="_blank">disbanded following a national controversy</a> surrounding these threatening messages. The threats were condemned by many, including the state’s chief minister.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To many Kashmiris, both the fatwa and the arrests by the government are unnecessary. Some say that the controversy erupted after the state’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah, got involved by expressing his support for the band on Twitter and then calling for investigation against those writing the threatening messages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Nobody here had a problem with the rock band,” said Aala Fazili, a doctorate student at Kashmir University, pointing out that the band’s performance in December had not led to any protests or physical threats against them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mr. Fazili, 32, added that people shouldn’t be arrested for writing abusive posts on Facebook. “You cannot call an abuse a threat,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mr. Pandita, the Kashmir police spokesman, said the investigators were making a distinction between a threat and abuse on the basis of “gravity.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pranesh Prakash, from the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, asked whether people who hold protests calling for the death of the author Salman Rushdie should also be arrested for making threats.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“I would hold that no expression of violent thoughts, online or offline, should be made criminal, even if it is repugnantly misogynistic, unless it takes the form of a credible threat that causes harm, or is harassment that constitutes harm,” he said.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/ny-times-feb-8-2013-betwa-sharma-online-abuse-of-teen-girls-in-kashmir-leads-to-arrests'>https://cis-india.org/news/ny-times-feb-8-2013-betwa-sharma-online-abuse-of-teen-girls-in-kashmir-leads-to-arrests</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet GovernanceCensorship2013-03-06T03:51:20ZNews ItemDonald Trump is attacking the social media giants; here’s what India should do differently
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/donald-trump-is-attacking-the-social-media-giants-here2019s-what-india-should-do-differently
<b>For a robust and rights-respecting public sphere, India needs to ensure that large social media platforms receive adequate protections, and are made more responsible to its users.</b>
<p>This piece was first published at <a class="external-link" href="https://scroll.in/article/965151/donald-trump-is-attacking-the-social-media-giants-heres-what-india-should-do-differently">Scroll</a>. The authors would like to thank Torsha Sarkar for reviewing and editing the piece, and to Divij Joshi for his feedback.</p>
<hr />
<div id="article-contents" class="article-body">
<p>In retaliation to Twitter <a class="link-external" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/technology/twitter-trump-mail-in-ballots.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">labelling</a> one of US President Donald Trump’s tweets as being misleading, the White House signed an <a class="link-external" href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-preventing-online-censorship/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">executive order</a>
on May 28 that seeks to dilute protections that social media companies
in the US have with respect to third-party content on their platforms.</p>
<p>The
order argues that social media companies that engage in censorship stop
functioning as ‘passive bulletin boards’: they must consequently be
treated as ‘content creators’, and be held liable for content on their
platforms as such. The shockwaves of the decision soon reached India,
with news coverage of the event <a class="link-external" href="https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/trump-twitter-spat-debate-rages-on-role-of-social-media-companies-120053100055_1.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">starting</a> to <a class="link-external" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/feud-between-donald-trump-and-jack-dorsey-can-have-long-lasting-effects-on-how-we-consume-media-in-india/articleshow/76111556.cms" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">debate</a> the <a class="link-external" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/trumps-move-against-social-media-cos-unlikely-to-change-indias-stand/articleshow/76094586.cms?from=mdr" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">consequences</a> of Trump’s order on how India regulates internet services and social media companies.</p>
<p>The
debate on the responsibilities of online platforms is not new to India,
and recently took main stage in December 2018 when the Ministry of
Electronics and Information Technology, Meity, published a draft set of
guidelines that most online services – ‘intermediaries’ – must follow.
The draft rules, which haven’t been notified yet, propose to
significantly expand the obligations on intermediaries.</p>
<p>Trump’s
executive order, however, comes in the context of content moderation
practices by social media platforms, i.e. when platforms censor speech
of their volition, and not because of legal requirements. The legal
position of content moderation is relatively under-discussed, at least
in legal terms, when it comes to India.</p>
<p>In contrast to
commentators who have implicitly assumed that Indian law permits content
moderation by social media companies, we believe Indian law fails to
adequately account for content moderation and curation practices
performed by social media companies. There may be adverse consequences
for the exercise of freedom of expression in India if this lacuna is not
filled soon.</p>
<h3 class="cms-block cms-block-heading">India vs US<br /></h3>
<p>A
useful starting point for the analysis is to compare how the US and
India regulate liability for online services. In the US, Section 230 of
the Communications Decency Act provides online services with broad
immunity from liability for third party content that they host or
transmit.</p>
<p>There are two critical components to what is generally referred to as Section 230.</p>
<p>First,
providers of an ‘interactive computer service’, like your internet
service provider or a company like Facebook, will not be treated as
publishers or speakers of third-party content. This system has allowed
the internet speech and economy to <a class="link-external" href="https://law.emory.edu/elj/content/volume-63/issue-3/articles/how-law-made-silicon-valley.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">flourish</a>
since it allows companies to focus on their service without a constant
paranoia for what users are transmitting through their service.</p>
<p>The
second part of Section 230 states that services are allowed to moderate
and remove, in ‘good faith’, such third-party content that they may
deem offensive or obscene. This allows for online services to instate
their own community guidelines or content policies.</p>
<p>In India,
section 79 of the Information Technology Act is the analogous provision:
it grants intermediaries conditional ‘safe harbour’. This means
intermediaries, again like Facebook or your internet provider, are
exempt from liability for third-party content – like messages or videos
posted by ordinary people – provided their functioning meets certain
requirements, and they comply with the allied rules, known as
Intermediary Guidelines.</p>
<p>The notable and stark difference between
Indian law and Section 230 is that India’s IT Act is largely silent on
content moderation practices. As Rahul Matthan <a class="link-external" href="https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/shield-online-platforms-for-content-moderation-to-work-11591116270685.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">points out</a>,
there is no explicit allowance in Indian law for platforms to take down
content based on their own policies, even if such actions are done in
good faith.</p>
<h3 class="cms-block cms-block-heading">Safe harbour</h3>
<div> </div>
<p>One
may argue that the absence of an explicit permission does not
necessarily mean that any platform engaging in content moderation
practices will lose its safe harbour. However, the language of Section
79 and the allied rules may even create room for divesting social media
platforms of their safe harbour.</p>
<p>The first such indication is
that the conditions to qualify for safe harbour, intermediaries must not
modify said content, not select the recipients of particular content,
and take information down when it is brought to their notice by
governments or courts.</p>
<p>Most of the conditions are almost a
verbatim copy of a ‘mere conduit’ as defined by the EU Directive on
E-Commerce, 2000. This definition was meant to encapsulate the
functioning of services like infrastructure providers, which transmit
content without exerting any real control. Thus, by adopting this
definition for all intermediaries, Indian law mostly considers internet
services, even social media platforms, to be passive plumbing through
which information flows.</p>
<p>It is easy to see how this narrow conception of online services is severely <a class="link-external" href="https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2.2-Gilespie-pp-198-216.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">lacking</a>.</p>
<p>Most prominent social media platforms <a class="link-external" href="http://guidelines." rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">remove</a> or <a class="link-external" href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/16/instagram-fact-checking/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">hide</a> content, <a class="link-external" href="https://about.fb.com/news/2016/06/building-a-better-news-feed-for-you/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">algorithmically curate</a> news-feeds to make users keep coming back for more, and increasingly add <a class="link-external" href="https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/updating-our-approach-to-misleading-information.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">labels</a>
to content. If the law is interpreted strictly, these practices may be
adjudged to run afoul of the aforementioned conditions that
intermediaries need to satisfy in order to qualify for safe harbour.</p>
<h3 class="cms-block cms-block-heading">Platforms or editors?<br /></h3>
<p>For
instance, it can be argued that social media platforms initiate
transmission in some form when they pick and ‘suggest’ relevant
third-party content to users. When it comes to newsfeeds, neither the
content creator nor the consumer have as much control over how their
content is disseminated or curated as much as the platform does. By
curating newsfeeds, social media platforms can be said to essentially
‘selecting the receiver’ of transmissions.</p>
<p>The Intermediary
Guidelines further complicate matters by specifically laying out what is
not to be construed as ‘editing’ under the law. Under rule 3(3), the
act of taking down content pursuant to orders under the Act will not be
considered as ‘editing’ of said content.</p>
<p>Since the term ‘editing’
has been left undefined beyond the negative qualification, several
social media intermediaries may well qualify as editors. They use
algorithms that curate content for their users; like traditional news
editors, these algorithms use certain <a class="link-external" href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Devito/publication/302979999_From_Editors_to_Algorithms_A_values-based_approach_to_understanding_story_selection_in_the_Facebook_news_feed/links/5a19cc3d4585155c26ac56d4/From-Editors-to-Algorithms-A-values-based-approach-to-understanding-story-selection-in-the-Facebook-news-feed.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">‘values’</a>
to determine what is relevant to their audiences. In other words, one
can argue that it is difficult to draw a bright line between editorial
and algorithmic acts.</p>
<p>To retain their safe harbour, the
counter-argument that social media platforms can rely is the fact that
Rule 3(5) of the Intermediary Guidelines requires intermediaries to
inform users that intermediaries reserve the right to take down user
content that relates to a wide of variety of acts, including content
that threatens national security, or is “[...] grossly harmful,
harassing, blasphemous, [etc.]”.</p>
<p>In practice, however, the
content moderation practices of some social media companies may go
beyond these categories. Additionally, the rule does not address the
legal questions created by these platforms’ curation of news-feeds.</p>
<p>The
purpose of highlighting how Section 79 treats the practices of social
media platforms is not with the intention of arguing that these
platforms should be held liable for user-generated content. Online
spaces created by social media platforms have allowed for individuals to
express themselves and participate in political organisation and <a class="link-external" href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/07/11/public-attitudes-toward-political-engagement-on-social-media/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">debate</a>.</p>
<p>A
level of protection of intermediaries from immunity is therefore
critical for the protection of several human rights, especially the
right to freedom of speech. This piece only serves to highlight that
section 79 is antiquated and unfit to deal with modern online services.
The interpretative dangers that exist in the provision create regulatory
uncertainty for organisations operating in India.</p>
<h3 class="cms-block cms-block-heading">Dangers to speech<br /></h3>
<p>These dangers may not just be theoretical.</p>
<p>Only last year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was <a class="link-external" href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-summoned-by-parliamentary-panel-on-feb-25-panel-refuses-to-hear-other-officials/story-8x9OUbNBo36uvp92L5nOKI.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">summoned</a>
by the Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology to answer
accusations of the platform having a bias against ‘right-wing’ accounts.
More recently, BJP politician Vinit Goenka <a class="link-external" href="https://www.medianama.com/2020/06/223-vinit-goenka-twitter-khalistan/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">encouraged people to file cases against Twitter</a> for promoting separatist content.</p>
<p>Recent <a class="link-external" href="https://sflc.in/sites/default/files/reports/Intermediary_Liability_2_0_-_A_Shifting_Paradigm.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">interventions</a>
from the Supreme Court have imposed proactive filtration and blocking
requirements on intermediaries, but these have been limited to
reasonable restrictions that may be imposed on free speech under Article
19 of India’s Constitution. Content moderation policies of
intermediaries like Twitter and Facebook go well beyond the scope of
Article 19 restrictions, and the apex court has not yet addressed this.</p>
<p>The
Delhi High Court, in Christian Louboutin v. Nakul Bajaj, has already
highlighted criteria for when e-commerce intermediaries can stake claim
to Section 79 safe harbour protections based on the active (or passive)
nature of their services. While the order came in the context of
intellectual property violations, nothing keeps a court from similarly
finding that Facebook and Twitter play an ‘active’ role when it comes to
content moderation and curation.</p>
<p>These companies may one day
find the ‘safe harbour’ rug pulled from under their feet if a court
reads section 79 more strictly. In fact, judicial intervention may not
even be required. The threat of such an interpretation may simply be
exploited by the government, and used as leverage to get social media
platforms to toe the government line.</p>
<h3 class="cms-block cms-block-heading">Protection and responsibility<br /></h3>
<p>Unfortunately,
the amendments to the intermediary guidelines proposed in 2018 do not
address the legal position of content moderation either. More recent
developments <a class="link-external" href="https://www.medianama.com/2020/04/223-meity-information-technology-act-amendments/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">suggest</a>
that the Meity may be contemplating amending the IT Act. This presents
an opportunity for a more comprehensive reworking of the Indian
intermediary liability regime than what is possible through delegated
legislation like the intermediary rules.</p>
<p>Intermediaries, rather
than being treated uniformly, should be classified based on their
function and the level of control they exercise over the content they
process. For instance, network infrastructure should continue to be
treated as ‘mere conduits’ and enjoy broad immunity from liability for
user-generated content.</p>
<p>More complex services like search engines
and online social media platforms can have differentiated
responsibilities based on the extent they can contextualise and change
content. The law should carve out an explicit permission to platforms to
moderate content in good faith. Such an allowance should be accompanied
by outlining best practices that these platforms can follow to ensure <a class="link-external" href="https://santaclaraprinciples.org/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">transparency and accountability</a> to their users.</p>
<p>For
a robust and rights-respecting public sphere, India needs to ensure
that large social media platforms receive adequate protections, and are
made more responsible to its users.</p>
<p><em>Anna Liz Thomas is a law
graduate and a policy researcher, currently working with the Centre for
Internet and Society. Gurshabad Grover manages research in the freedom
of expression and internet governance team at CIS</em>.</p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/donald-trump-is-attacking-the-social-media-giants-here2019s-what-india-should-do-differently'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/donald-trump-is-attacking-the-social-media-giants-here2019s-what-india-should-do-differently</a>
</p>
No publisherAnna Liz Thomas and Gurshabad GroverContent takedownFreedom of Speech and ExpressionIntermediary Liability2020-06-25T09:07:52ZBlog EntryThe State of Secure Messaging
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-state-of-secure-messaging
<b>A look at the protections provided by and threats posed to secure communication online.</b>
<p><em>This blogpost was edited by Gurshabad Grover and Amber Sinha.</em></p>
<p dir="ltr">The current benchmark for secure communication online is
end-to-end encrypted messaging. It refers to a method of encryption
wherein the contents of a message are only readable by the devices of
the individuals, or endpoints, participating in the communication. All
other Internet intermediaries such as internet service providers,
internet exchange points, undersea cable operators, data centre
operators, and even the messaging service providers themselves cannot
read them. This is achieved through cryptographic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange">mechanisms</a>
that allow independent devices to establish a shared secret key over an
insecure communication channel, which they then use to encrypt and
decrypt messages. Common examples of end-to-end encrypted messaging are
applications like Signal and WhatsApp.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This post attempts to give at-risk individuals, concerned
citizens, and civil society at large a more nuanced understanding of the
protections provided and threats posed to the security and privacy of
their communications online.</p>
<h4 dir="ltr">Threat Model</h4>
<p dir="ltr">The first step to assessing security and privacy is to
identify and understand actors and risks. End-to-end encrypted messaging
applications consider the following threat model:</p>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Device compromise: Can happen physically through loss or
theft, or remotely. Access to an individual’s device could be gained
through technical flaws or coercion (<a href="https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us-border-2017">legal</a>, or <a href="https://xkcd.com/538/">otherwise</a>). It can be temporary or be made persistent by installing <a href="https://citizenlab.ca/2019/10/nso-q-cyber-technologies-100-new-abuse-cases/">malware</a> on the device.</p>
</li><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Network monitoring and interference: Implies access to data
in transit over a network. All Internet intermediaries have such
access. They may either actively interfere with the communication or
passively <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/">observe</a> traffic.</p>
</li><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Server compromise: Implies access to the web server hosting
the application. This could be achieved through technical flaws,
insider access such as an employee, or through coercion (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016">legal</a>, or otherwise). </p>
</li></ul>
<p dir="ltr">End-to-end encrypted messaging aims to offer complete
message confidentiality and integrity in the face of server and network
compromise, and some protections against device compromise. These are
detailed below.</p>
<h4 dir="ltr">Protections Provided</h4>
<p dir="ltr">Secure messaging services guarantee certain properties. For
mature services that have received adequate study from researchers, we
can assume them to be sound, barring implementation flaws which are
described later.</p>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Confidentiality: The contents of a message are kept private and the ciphers used are <a href="https://pthree.org/2016/06/19/the-physics-of-brute-force/">practically</a> unbreakable by adversaries.</p>
</li></ul>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Integrity: The contents of a message cannot be modified in transit.</p>
</li></ul>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Deniability: Aims to mimic unrecorded real-world
conversations where an individual can deny having said something.
Someone in possession of the chat transcript cannot <em>cryptographically</em>
prove that an individual authored a particular message. While some
applications feature such off-the-record messaging capabilities, the
legal applicability of such mechanisms is <a href="https://debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog/104">debatable</a>.</p>
</li></ul>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Forward and Future Secrecy: These properties aim to limit
the effects of a temporary compromise of credentials on a device.
Forward secrecy ensures messages collected over the network, which were
sent before the compromise, cannot be decrypted. Future secrecy ensures
messages sent post-compromise are protected. These mechanisms are easily
circumvented in practice as past messages are usually stored on the
device being compromised, and future messages can be obtained by gaining
persistent access during compromise. These properties are meant to
protect individuals <a href="https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01966560/document">aware</a> of these limitations in exceptional situations such as a journalist crossing a border.</p>
</li></ul>
<h4 dir="ltr">Shortcomings</h4>
<p dir="ltr">While secure messaging services offer useful protections
they also have some shortcomings. It is useful to understand these and
their mitigations to minimise risk.</p>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Metadata: Information about a communication such as <strong>who</strong> the participants are, <strong>when</strong> the messages are sent, <strong>where</strong> the participants are located, and <strong>what</strong>
the size of a message is can offer important contextual information
about a conversation. While some popular messaging services <a href="https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/">attempt</a>
to minimize metadata generation, metadata leakage, in general, is still
considered an open problem because such information can be gleaned by
network monitoring as well as from server compromise. Application
policies around whether such data is stored and for how long it is
retained can improve privacy. There are also <a href="https://ricochet.im/">experimental</a> approaches that use techniques like onion routing to hide metadata.</p>
</li></ul>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Authentication: This is the process of asserting whether an
individual sending or receiving a message is who they are thought to
be. Current messaging services trust application servers and cell
service providers for authentication, which means that they have the
ability to replace and impersonate individuals in conversations.
Messaging services offer advanced features to mitigate this risk, such
as notifications when a participant’s identity changes, and manual
verification of participants’ security keys through other communication
channels (in-person, mail, etc.).</p>
</li></ul>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Availability: An individual’s access to a messaging service
can be impeded. Intermediaries may delay or drop messages resulting in
what is called a denial of service attack. While messaging services are
quite resilient to such attacks, governments may censor or completely
shut down Internet access.</p>
</li></ul>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Application-level gaps: Capabilities offered by services in
addition to messaging, such as contact discovery, online status, and
location sharing are often <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/01/22/whatsapp-facebook-backdoor-government-data-request/">not covered</a>
by end-to-end encryption and may be stored by the application server.
Application policies around how such information is gathered and
retained affect privacy.</p>
</li></ul>
<ul><li style="list-style-type: disc;" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr">Implementation flaws and backdoors: Software or hardware
flaws (accidental or intentional) on an individual’s device could be
exploited to circumvent the protections provided by end-to-end
encryption. For mature applications and platforms, accidental flaws are
difficult and <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/for-the-first-time-ever-android-0days-cost-more-than-ios-exploits/">expensive</a> to exploit, and as such are only accessible to Government or other
powerful actors who typically use them to surveil individuals of
interest (and not for mass surveillance). Intentional flaws or backdoors
introduced by manufacturers may also be present. The only defence
against these is security researchers who rely on manual inspection to
examine software and network interactions to detect them.</p>
</li></ul>
<h4 dir="ltr">Messaging Protocols and Standards</h4>
<p dir="ltr">In the face of demands for exceptional access to encrypted
communication from governments, and risks of mass surveillance from both
governments and corporations, end-to-end encryption is important to
enable secure and private communication online. The signal protocol,
which is open and adopted by popular applications like WhatsApp and
Signal, is considered a success story as it brought end-to-end
encryption to over a billion users and has become a de-facto standard.</p>
<p dir="ltr">However, it is unilaterally developed and controlled by a single organisation. Messaging Layer Security (or <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/">MLS</a>)
is a working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
that is attempting to standardise end-to-end encryption through
participation of individuals from corporations, academia, and civil
society. The draft protocol offers the standard security properties
mentioned above, except for deniability which is still being considered.
It incorporates novel research that allows it to scale efficiently for
large groups up to thousands of participants, which is an improvement
over the signal protocol. MLS aims to increase adoption further by
creating open standards and implementations, similar to the Transport
Layer Security (TLS) protocol used to encrypt much of the web today.
There is also a need to look beyond end-to-end encryption to address its
shortcomings, particularly around authentication and metadata leakage.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-state-of-secure-messaging'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-state-of-secure-messaging</a>
</p>
No publisherdivyankFreedom of Speech and ExpressionEncryptionIETF2020-07-17T08:12:15ZBlog EntryMapping Web Censorship & Net Neutrality Violations
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/mapping-web-censorship-net-neutrality-violations
<b></b>
<p> </p>
<p>For over a year, researchers at the Centre
for Internet and Society have been studying website blocking by internet
service providers (ISPs) in India. We have learned that major ISPs
don’t always block the same websites, and also use different blocking
techniques. <strong>To take this study further, and map net neutrality violations by ISPs, we need your help.</strong>
We have developed CensorWatch, a research tool to collect empirical
evidence about what websites are blocked by Indian ISPs, and which
blocking methods are being used to do so. Read more about this project (<a href="https://4jok2.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/cl/f/qxKoDnnG4cR8mPZaiOr8immlHKFilRoRSYOvX_26BcZRtiN_hoo5VrFfQHbDqaES1OV6jUM0RbWCZs1ODSHr_Pf9yeJFesRxxQvyUrZm4Tlcvdjmh232QQV3fOkmrj9wiVh5LQiW1LQAprvYWmHp_s-TW5ZdNXZY07QvlFR01dKzIxnv7TorEfkyazo" target="_blank">link</a>), <strong>download CensorWatch</strong> (<a href="https://4jok2.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/cl/f/F9Wsq5zbx6VJKZxrsjYFy3Q5-jSkk0-3nr5hBfuyQiDUEKyEm_fLY6kh4W9MB7GOLoPZbowqsXDT17DEmFgMoFY4IIOEjxq0rNCtFeEc7b-0GSnRPeLDi9VmYX5WE1vGlwMvM7BPtyfmXD6lNdIWzAdjq_MpSqWRACk3JJNPhzqieJXoEoOnY8WH1rxR4HnJwDjyJHSkHgMTmWcm0POB_kDOtt2fk_GnXkkjv5LK7MxRZe8f" target="_blank">link</a>), and help determine if ISPs are complying with India’s net neutrality regulations.</p>
<div>
<p> </p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.censorwatch.netprobesapp"><img src="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/censorwatch/" alt="null" width="75%" /></a></p>
<p> </p>
<div>
<div>
<div>Learn more about website blocking in India, through our recent work on the issue —</div>
<ol><li>Using information from court orders,
user reports, and government orders, and running network tests from six
ISPs, Kushagra Singh, Gurshabad Grover and Varun Bansal presented the <strong>largest study of web blocking</strong>
in India. Through their work, they demonstrated that major ISPs in
India use different techniques to block websites, and that they don’t
block the same websites (<a href="https://4jok2.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/cl/f/mgmW9wuVo0QjRGqm9DnDQiVT4lYy3lgY5maOgjAk05baH_NWtRSfznWooMtcTgQ2a059mWk91p_lMZqJAqaRHXZOLSEQQOAMeM5RowiyfY3giKQm3aDJoYnWw7VhAHeBjdkObBFF0PYWjoC1NJi21fSZyifOWm_CvlC3gq7nxbHtejEy" target="_blank">link</a>).</li><li>Gurshabad Grover and Kushagra Singh
collaborated with Simone Basso of the Open Observatory of Network
Interference (OONI) to study <strong>HTTPS traffic blocking in India</strong> by running experiments on the networks of three popular Indian ISPs: ACT Fibernet, Bharti Airtel, and Reliance Jio (<a href="https://4jok2.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/cl/f/oP_eOysGeBOsgRW-5k8V-ReWU_DMUhykR2wN9ZAqndgHev3bxY1c8kSSviR3jjOMqzOJhP05AfK2CtHAH8-Zv21mU7uAW2ainkl5tmS-uZx3LG15MjZXbRQyE71871AouDuXY0hLTVEVG3ovaEvb8BSFOhJz7NpnTZdsY5vIOeBqSsaB31HJdMT8bNELQJ8VjhUoNw" target="_blank">link</a>).</li><li>For <em>The Leaflet</em>, Torsha Sarkar and Gurshabad Grover wrote about the <strong>legal framework of blocking in India</strong>
— Section 69A of the IT Act and its rules. They considered commentator
opinions questioning the constitutionality of the regime, whether
originators of content are entitled to a hearing, and whether Rule 16,
which mandates confidentiality of content takedown requests received by
intermediaries from the Government, continues to be operative (<a href="https://4jok2.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/cl/f/WggQUDysA9mWPEzvGTRc43aPpKNmNjDcdEzj1ALhrbXgQWqnZRY9L9J45XXbJ3yCnX9-XIuYyRTQ588cBiYNQIs2KsfB0Dydz2QY4Z5VdMTdJ-RMr2M5uDqJ8Amr5gT3APy01bg8gNTyoEvdIcKryjrWnUFlTdxFAtohQ_AwVRjTbzC5FcAFhO9DdHOQV0Xp9X65At3tR17epGvo" target="_blank">link</a>).</li><li>In the <em>Hindustan Times</em>, Gurshabad Grover critically analysed <strong>the confidentiality requirement embedded within Section 69A of the IT Act</strong> and argued how this leads to internet users in India experiencing arbitrary censorship (<a href="https://4jok2.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/cl/f/j75HVdd7j4huKQd0kP9lusNpz1ZL0CxXMEWeySOhsQZbcKECrEKfaq52LlB-QjnT1TIB1mjqhB0TyweA7rLCq41Rd_6uyBUo8-Uc4iHiHSXYxC06rhW7o7ZFtCt7bKdNldDWkoMhSD7x0daAhzcSdLSPbNBRSy1HkGEGZ7Z_11tovlleodez9gm60zyvkGNM1YMQSLZ4NZ0k8RD2zncGPoWXjsytI4YwnQyy_QZNSKOSdY2_X6GoVSugRZhmyWwWCpHpk-yDM7XJ0OF4GZlTUSgfhcfftJEGBlQlkQ" target="_blank">link</a>).</li><li>Torsha Sarkar, along with Sarvjeet Singh of the Centre for Communication Governance (CCG), spoke to <em>Medianama</em> delineating the <strong>procedural aspects of section 69A of the IT Act </strong>(<a href="https://4jok2.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/cl/f/QAWrguo8Vx6X1PsmbTvCTYQ6U6nycGdSRg9gfDYFTRxUAa82nB6gYpuPyEE3VztSJzG2888ua224upBlg-k9Tu29TZdhl3ET71WwsKUfKxdyUPkLiY1A4jSD1p59sH0KXlQBqU10H38gDFHZ5WVsMCwZXLTISv9SvXIRx7Vu59U4HBV-hhB3BSpe_SApQnHQgPN0BIl0g852jSINvTI6Bh5HGNTWZ3nQWRn5H1vShoG4Q3VcZBWfewbc" target="_blank">link</a>).</li><li>Arindrajit Basu spoke to the <em>Times of India</em> about the <strong>geopolitical and regulatory implications</strong> of the Indian government’s move to ban fifty-nine Chinese applications from India (<a href="https://4jok2.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/cl/f/lICwdbQnezwqQKZHQ_Xso6Qp7735jleiJJJI88DgKZx348ewlSRWU1uFyEbtMwZOoJRS5MjHbX9KgklFrlc-jKTXKL2S4K5aCXEU2isCuFhwORAz_DnnBai7nr2pyiK0HmM0Eb3AD_JyTUwWtg9O6c0jV0Nf8cbTuT3FD7WypVO_NWUJ_GZVo7er10LMUXE_1EP_d2nh2uziuXXmM1JV-9NN6klSATsLa_tprf0bDNbNa_U4DHMm6oQvXFfVHj74jRhq3nKDkCzQeQZ_SRMxNNqIUIN5aMLGbQfBAziZ_E3hIYp-ptOQ7Y2cqF_4eiYdY20tBm5ltySmFBQQi5_nFQ" target="_blank">link</a>).</li></ol>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/mapping-web-censorship-net-neutrality-violations'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/mapping-web-censorship-net-neutrality-violations</a>
</p>
No publisherpranavFreedom of Speech and ExpressionNet NeutralityInternet Governanceinternet governanceCensorship2020-10-05T07:59:47ZBlog EntryRespite from Internet Censorship?
https://cis-india.org/news/www-thinkdigit-com-nimish-sawant-02-06-2012-respite-from-internet-censorship
<b>Of late, a lot of the blocked websites have started reappearing. So should we sit back and relax? We take a look at how it's not really the start of something beautiful...writes Nimish Sawant. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.thinkdigit.com/Internet/Respite-from-Internet-Censorship_10347.html">Published in thinkdigit on June 2, 2012</a></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In April, Chennai based Copyrights Labs got a John Doe order (An order against no one in particular) from Madras High Court which ordered ISPs to block several video hosting websites such as Vimeo and Dailymotion along with a string of torrent sites such as Isohunt and Pirate Bay. The motive was to prevent illegal sharing of the movies 3 and Dhammu. The ISPs went on this whole website blocking spree welcoming users with messages such as, “This website has been blocked as per instructions from the Department of Telecom (DoT)”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In June, the Madras High Court issued an order which made it mandatory for complainants to provide exact URLs where they find illegal content, such that ISPs could block only that content and not the entire site.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This order is definitely a relief for Indian internet users, who were facing a variety of blocked websites for a couple of months. In the May-June period there was a lot of media coverage around Internet censorship and then there was the much-hyped Anonymous protest (<a class="external-link" href="http://goo.gl/YCQod">http://goo.gl/YCQod</a>) that saw a not-so-great participation. Just like most media stories, it is slowly departing from the public conciousness. So does this mean our censorship woes are behind us?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Far from it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>The dark cloud of Intermediaries Guidelines</b><br />The Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011 were added to the IT Act 2000. According to it, the intermediaries (website, domain registrar, blog owner and so on) guidelines allows the government to pull up any website that hosts “objectionable” content. It gives anyone the right to send “content removal notice” to an intermediary, asking it to be removed within 36 hours. Terms describing such content - grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene - are those that are open to interpretation. So, Facebook can be hauled up for derogatory content or pages on its site. Hell, even if you own a blog and someone else posts a derogatory comment, you can be pulled up.<br /><br />This is a rather smart move by the government to force self-censorship down our throats. Just try imagining - Every 60 seconds: on YouTube there are 48 hours worth of videos uploaded; Wordpress users publish 347 blogs; Twitter users send over 100,000 tweets among others. (Source: <a class="external-link" href="http://goo.gl/U7qT8">http://goo.gl/U7qT8</a>) How on earth is monitoring such a vast amount of data even possible?</p>
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<th>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/karnikaseth250.jpg" alt="Karnika" class="image-inline" title="Karnika" /></p>
<p>Karnika Seth, Cyberlaw Expert</p>
</th>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">"Any content which is illegal can be blocked by ISP or on directions of a court.A person who uploads illegal content does not have a right to claim that it should not be blocked. But if harmless content is blocked arbitrarily by government or by an ISP, a person can approach the court for a direction that content should not be blocked from public access. No specific section in IT Act entitles a person to sue in such cases . However freedom of speech and expression is our fundamental right guaranteed under Art.19 of the Constitution of India and it is our constitutional right to seek legal redress for its protection by approaching the court."</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Every site has internal checks and balances in the form of a 'Report Abuse' option, where users raise flags against content which they may find objectionable and the site takes a call. But with the intermediary rules, the content has to be removed within 36 hours. And here's the kicker – the content can be removed without informing the owner or giving him or her a chance to defend. A political cartoon website cartoonsagainstcorruption.com was a victim of such rules. In March this year, Rajya Sabha MP, P. Rajeeve, had moved a motion calling for the annulment of the intermediaries rules sometime in April. This motion, as would be expected, was defeated by a voice vote.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Any content which is illegal can be blocked by the ISP or on directions of a court. A person who uploads illegal content does not have a right to claim that it should not be blocked. But if harmless content is blocked arbitrarily by government or by an ISP, a person can approach the court for a direction that content should not be blocked from public access,” said cyberlaw expert Karnika Seth. When asked if there is a clause in the IT Act which enables a person to drag the government or the ISP for blocking access to their harmless content on the web, Seth said, “No specific section in the IT Act entitles a person to sue in such cases . However, freedom of speech and expression is our fundamental right guaranteed under Art.19 of the Constitution of India and it is our constitutional right to seek legal redress for its protection by approaching the court.”<br /> <br /> So what should one do if his or her content is blocked due to the blanket ban on websites? “If I am blocked access to my content on the web (say by blocking sites such as Vimeo or Blogspot for instance) I should file an appeal against the John Doe order in the higher court or to the division bench of High court if earlier order has been passed by single bench of the same High court. These provisions are there for any citizen in Procedural Law of India. The IT Act, 2000 need not be invoked,” says Advocate Prashant Mali, President, Cyber Law Consulting.<br /> <br /> Google Transparency report clearly established a link between internet censorship and the government. According to the report, between January and June 2011 Google received 1739 requests for disclosure of user data from the Indian government whereas from July to December 2011, the number of requests by the government went up to 2207. Thankfully Google's compliance rate has come down, but the requests will keep increasing. And this is just Google products we are talking about. Is it then right for just the government to go ahead and draft the rules regarding internet usage? Are there provisions for you, the user to play a part in drafting of these rules. According to Advocate Mali, laws are generally put up for debate on various Government websites. But in the case of the Intermediaries Guidelines, the government used the two-thirds majority to pass the rules.<br /> <br /> According to Sunil Abraham, Director, Centre for Internet and Society – a Bangalore-based internet advocacy group, we are very far in terms of Internet policies. “Dr. Gulshan Rai of CERT-IN has not taken even the public feedback process seriously and does not hold public consultations. This is very unlike TRAI, the telecoms regulator that has a very sophisticated approach towards transparent and participatory policy formulation.” He says that in India there is little transparency in some areas of policy articulation and our representatives do not seem sufficiently interested in protecting the public interest.<br /> <br /> Also according to Adv. Mali, the recent Madras High Court directive asking the ISPs to block only the ‘pirated content’ and not the entire website, is just half the battle won for the ISPs. “If ISP's feel they have won, then that's just half the victory, because if they don't implement the order with full might and even if one copyright gets infringed because of there weak enforcement, then it would amount to Contempt of Court which will land ISP's into soup,” he says.</p>
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">“The Madras High Court judgement which essentially directs ISPs to block “pirated content”, and not the website as a whole, is a good judgment with respect to Internet users, but implementing it selectively would be a mammoth task for ISP's. If ISP's feel they have won, then it's just half the battle won, because if they don't implement the order with full might and even if one copyright gets infringed because of weak enforcement, then it would amount to Contempt of Court which will land ISP's into soup."</td>
<td>
<p><img height="117" src="http://www.thinkdigit.com/FCKeditor/uploads/Adv%20Prashant%20Mali-250%281%29.jpg" title="Advocate Prashant Mali, President, Cyber Law Consulting" width="114" /></p>
<p><b>Advocate Prashant Mali, President, Cyber Law Consulting</b></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Is the Anonymous way, the right way?</b><br /> In June, we saw the global hactivist organisation - Anonymous attacking a string of Government websites and that of ISPs such as Reliance communications, which had blocked access to websites. On June 9, there was a street protest across various metros in India. While the participation was not very encouraging, the sympathy for what Anonymous hackers were doing to those opposing Internet censorship was immense.<br /> <br /> According to Advocate Mali, though the agenda of Anonymous was good, their means of achieving that end were wrong. “One cannot put a gun on the Government’s head in a democracy. If they keep doing this, they will be outlawed. If Anonymous really wants to work for the netizens, they should find better ways to protest instead of those which are cognizable cyber crimes in India.” said Mali.<br /> <br /> According to Abraham, Anonymous are embracing the civil disobedience movement to protest against unjust laws. He feels that it is pertinent for Anonymous to retain the moral high ground. “Breaking into servers, leaks of personal information and defacement of websites is both illegal and also unlikely to win them more supporters from within the policy formulation space,” concurs Abraham.</p>
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<tbody>
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<td>
<p><img height="166" src="http://www.thinkdigit.com/FCKeditor/uploads/Sunil%20Abraham-250.jpg" title="Sunil Abraham, Director, Centre for Internet and Society" width="250" /></p>
<p><b>Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet & Society</b></p>
</td>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">“The government ie. the government in power, does only frame subsidiary rules. For example – the draconian rules related to reasonable security measures, cyber cafes and intermediaries were drafted in April last year. The main Act in this case the Information Technology Act is framed in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. Even though the elected government may dominate the proceedings, if they have a clear majority, the opposition parties must debate every detail especially in laws that affect our civil liberties. Unfortunately, since the Internet is not used by the majority of the population it is politically still an insignificant issue. The private sector cannot frame laws that regulate itself – that would be a contradiction in terms. Citizens cannot be asked to vote in referendums each time laws have to be passed, that would just be too slow. Transparency representative democracy is the online option – unfortunately in India there is little transparency in some areas of policy articulation and our representatives don't seem to be sufficiently interested in protecting the public interest.”</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Where do we go from here?</b><br /> So it is safe to say that even though the issue of censorship is not making headlines everyday, it will never will be behind us. “This is just a temporary lull in the storm. Governments are always keen to crack down on free speech and privacy online,” feels Abraham. According to him, projects such as Unique Identification (UID) and National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) means the death of anonymity and pseudonymity for Internet and mobile users in the country.<br /> <br /> On the other hand, Adv. Mali says that so long as the Intermediaries guidelines are part of the IT Act, it will only mean bad news for regular netizens. “Till the rules are effective, censorship and blocking would be a weapon in the hands of the Government, even though it may violate certain Fundamental Rights enshrined by Indian Constitution to Indian Citizens,” he said.<br /> <br /> “Indian Internet users have to be very vigilant – if not, we will loose all our rights and freedoms one by one,” warns Abraham.<br /> <br /> We can just hope that the issue does not get completely out of hand.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/www-thinkdigit-com-nimish-sawant-02-06-2012-respite-from-internet-censorship'>https://cis-india.org/news/www-thinkdigit-com-nimish-sawant-02-06-2012-respite-from-internet-censorship</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-10T15:51:30ZNews ItemKilling of Yameen Rasheed Reveals Worsening Human Rights Situation in the Maldives
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/yameen-rasheed-human-rights-maldives
<b>A courageous liberal blogger in the Maldives was murdered for his words. The international community needs to act.</b>
<p>The fight for freedom of expression is often abstract. On Sunday, it became personal for me: Yameen Rasheed, a courageous human rights defender and blogger in the Maldives, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/world/asia/yameen-rasheed-dead-maldives-blogger-dead.html?smid=tw-nytimesworld&smtyp=cur&_r=0">was brutally murdered just outside his apartment</a>. Yameen ran the popular blog <a href="http://thedailypanic.com">The Daily Panic</a> in which he sought to "cover and comment upon the news, satirize the frequently unsatirizable politics of Maldives, and also provide a platform to capture and highlight the diversity of Maldivian opinion". In this blog he often ended up rubbing the powerful the wrong way, with politicians and religious bigots often finding themselves at the receiving end of his satire.</p>
<p>Yameen wasn't the first human rights activist to be attacked. He also led the campaign to force the police to conduct a proper investigation on the <a href="http://findmoyameehaa.com/">forced disappearance in August 2014</a> of journalist Ahmed Rilwan <a href="https://twitter.com/moyameeha">@moyameehaa</a>, whom he counted as his closest friend. This campaign made him a target as well.</p>
<p>When there was a crackdown on the largest pro-democracy rally in Malé on 1st May 2015, <a href="http://thedailypanic.com/2015/06/dhoonidhoo-diaries-part-1-arrest-and-incarceration/">Yameen became a political prisoner</a>: he was remanded in jail for 17 days, and then moved to house arrest. Hundreds of others were also arrested then. Some opposition leaders continue to remain in jail. Sheikh Imran Abdulla, the leader of the [Adhaalath Party] who spoke at that rally, was convicted on charges of terrorism and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/17/maldives-court-jails-opposition-figure-sheikh-imran-abdulla-for-12-years">sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment</a>.</p>
<p>As a result of his advocacy for freedom of religion and freedom of expression in the Maldives, Yameen <a href="https://twitter.com/yaamyn/status/711796772985659392">received death threats</a> on multiple occasions that he reported to the police, who refused to do anything about those complaints.</p>
<p>Why, despite receiving death threats did Yameen continue to voice his opinions fearlessly? When asked, "Do you have a death wish?", <a href="https://twitter.com/yaamyn/status/630344675958718464">he replied</a>: "No. I have a dignified life wish."</p>
<p>Amnesty International has called upon the Maldivian authorities to conduct a full investigation into this killing. I, however, believe that there is no hope for justice from the very police that refused to protect Yameen, and whom he held to be complicit in the disappearance of Rilwan. As Yameen said in 2015, <a href="https://twitter.com/yaamyn/status/569766158926131200">it is time for the international community to act</a>. I hope each of you reading this contacts your external affairs ministry and asks them to apply pressure on the Maldivian authorities, and push for an international investigation into the breakdown of human rights in the Maldives.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/yameen-rasheed-human-rights-maldives'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/yameen-rasheed-human-rights-maldives</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshFreedom of Speech and ExpressionMaldives2017-04-25T10:12:48ZBlog EntryAnalyzing the Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism and Rioting Edition) Part II
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/analyzing-the-latest-list-of-blocked-sites-communalism-and-rioting-edition-part-ii
<b>Snehashish Ghosh does a further analysis of the leaked list of the websites blocked by the Indian Government from August 18, 2012 till August 21, 2012 (“leaked list”). </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Unnecessary Blocks and Mistakes:</b></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">http://hinduexistance.files.wordpress.com/..., which appears on the leaked list, does not exist because the URL is incorrect. However, the correct URL does contain an image which, in my opinion, can be considered to be capable of inciting violence. It has not been blocked due to a spelling error in the order. Instead of blocking hinduexist<b><i>e</i></b>nce.wordpress.com/... the DoT has ordered the blocking of hinduexist<b><i>a</i></b>nce.wordpress.com/..., which does not exist.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Two URLs in the block order are from the website of the High Council for Human Rights, Judiciary of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The reason for blocking these two links from this particular website is unclear.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The website of the Union of NGOs of the Islamic World was blocked. Again, the reason for blocking this website remains unclear.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">URLs such as, http://farazahmed.com/..., mumblingminion.blogspot.com, were blocked. The content on these URLs was in fact debunking the fake photographs.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Certain blocked Facebook pages did not have any bearing on the North East exodus which was the main reason behind the blocks. For example, Facebook link leading to United States Institute for Peace page was blocked.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Duration of the Block</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) did not specify the period for which the block has been implemented in its orders. As a result of which certain URLs still remain blocked while a majority of the links in the leaked list can be accessed. Lack of clear directions from the DoT has resulted in haphazard blocking and certain internet service providers (ISPs) have lifted the block on certain links whereas some other ISPs have continued with a complete block.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>How have the intermediaries reacted to the block orders?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Going by the leaked list of websites blocked by DoT, it issued the block orders to ‘all internet service licensees’. Intermediaries that do not fall in the category of 'internet service licensees’ were also sent a separate set of requests for taking down third party content. However, it is unclear under which provision of the law such request was made by the Government.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Internet Service Licensees</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/chart_1.png" alt="Implementation of the order at the ISP level" class="image-inline" title="Implementation of the order at the ISP level" /><br /></b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The internet service licensee or the ISPs have not followed any uniform system to notify that a particular URL or website in the leaked list is blocked according to DoT’s orders. The lack of transparency in the implementation of the block orders, have a chilling effect on free speech.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For instance, BSNL returns the following messages:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"This website/URL has been blocked until further notice either pursuant to Court orders or on the Directions issued by the Department of Telecommunications" or “This site has been blocked as per instructions from Department of Telecom (DOT).”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, these messages are not uniform across all the URLs/websites in the leaked list. BSNL does not generate any response for the majority of the URLs in the leaked list. This results in ‘invisible censorship’ as the person who is trying to access the blocked URL does not have any means to know whether a particular URL is unavailable or certain sites are blocked by government orders.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Lack of notification does not only infringes upon the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression but also violates the fundamental right to a constitutional remedy guaranteed under Article 32 of our Constitution. The person aggrieved by such block orders cannot approach the Court for a remedy because there is no means to figure out:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(a) Description of the content blocked?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(b) Who has issued the block order/request?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(c) Under which provision of the law such block order/request has been issued?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(d) Who has implemented the block order/request? and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(e) What was the reason for the block?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The intermediaries should provide with the above notification details while implementing a block order issued by the Government. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Intermediaries hosting third party content: </b></p>
<p align="right" style="text-align: justify; ">More than 100 out of the 309 blocks are Facebook (http and https) URLs. Facebook has not informed its users about the reasons behind unavailability of certain pages or content. This is another instance of invisible censorship. However, YouTube, a Google service, has maintained certain level of transparency, and informs the user that the content has been blocked as per ‘government removal request’. It is interesting to note that certain YouTube user accounts were terminated as well. It is unclear whether this was as a result of the block order. Furthermore, links associated with blogger.com, which is another service provided by Google, have been removed.</p>
<hr />
<p align="right" style="text-align: justify; ">This was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.medianama.com/2012/09/223-analyzing-the-latest-list-of-blocked-sites-communalism-rioting-edition-part-ii/">re-posted</a> by Medianama on September 26, 2012.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/analyzing-the-latest-list-of-blocked-sites-communalism-and-rioting-edition-part-ii'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/analyzing-the-latest-list-of-blocked-sites-communalism-and-rioting-edition-part-ii</a>
</p>
No publishersnehashishIT ActSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceIntermediary LiabilitySocial Networking2012-09-27T10:42:30ZBlog EntryGovt plans inter-ministerial panel on Internet policy
https://cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-sep-19-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-plans-inter-ministerial-panel-on-internet-policy
<b>The government may set up an inter-ministerial panel to improve coordination among the various arms of the government on Internet-related issues such as governance, commerce and security, according to a senior government official who didn’t want to be named.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Surabhi Agarwal's article was <a class="external-link" href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Politics/RfSpWTiWQ1KWC6yY8LqhfO/Govt-plans-interministerial-panel-on-Internet-policy.html">originally published</a> in LiveMint on September 19, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The panel will have representation from government departments including information technology, telecom, home, external affairs and commerce among others. The proposal is being considered because there are multiple stakeholders involved, said the official. The panel will be most likely be headed by the department of electronics and information technology, which is currently the policymaking body on the Internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over the past year, the government has been criticized over several Internet-related issues, all of them to do with censorship. It received flak recently for the way it sought to contain the spread of hate messages over the Internet that had led to communal violence and a panic exodus by people from the north-eastern states in some cities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Moreover, with the underlying aim of having a bigger say in global policymaking pertaining to the Internet, the government had proposed the establishment of the United Nations Committee on Internet Related Policy (UN-CIRP). The agency’s mandate will include developing and establishing international public policies relating to the Internet; coordinating and overseeing bodies responsible for the technical and operational functioning of the Internet; facilitating negotiation of treaties; undertaking arbitration and dispute resolution; and crisis management, among others.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government has said that the intent behind proposing such a body was not to control the Internet but to develop a mechanism for globally acceptable and harmonized policy making. The move though has largely been construed as an effort by governments to regulate the Internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Currently, the Internet is largely governed by the not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). However, the government says ICANN is dominated mostly by the US, explaining the need for a body such as UN-CIRP.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another government official confirmed that an inter-ministerial panel is currently being “mulled” over. This official, who also did not want to be identified, said the Internet governance policy is increasing in importance and there was a need to discuss whether the current global policymaking structure would be relevant in the next five years.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“We need to firm up the country’s stand at international forums of the Internet and an inter-ministerial committee will aid in bringing some kind of clarity,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Any proposal for better coordination between different wings of the government would be welcome, said <a href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Sunil%20Abraham">Sunil Abraham</a>, executive director of Bangalore-based research organization Centre for Internet and Society.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The thumb rule with governance, be it international or national, is that coordination policy formulation bodies is a good idea, but we can’t damn or praise them over the process,” he said. “We have to see what coordination results out of the body.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rajya Sabha member of Parliament <a href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Rajeev%20Chandrasekhar">Rajeev Chandrasekhar</a>, who wrote to Prime Minister <a href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Manmohan%20Singh">Manmohan Singh</a> opposing UN-CIRP, had said that India’s proposal was made without much discussion and stakeholder consultation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There wasn’t enough clarity about what the government trying to regulate through the body, Abraham said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Is it to regulate citizens or industry or government activity or for regulation around IP (intellectual property), competition, data protection, crime or tax, we don’t know,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The problem with UN-CIRP is that India would be supported by countries that are against free access to the Internet such as Cuba, China and Russia to name a few, <a href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Naresh%20Ajwani">Naresh Ajwani</a>, a member of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) said on Wednesday on the sidelines of a meet in Delhi on the issue.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, the government feels that not only will UN-CIRP lead to India having a bigger role in global policymaking for the Internet, it will also help in dealing with crises better as it will lead to enhanced cooperation between nations.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-sep-19-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-plans-inter-ministerial-panel-on-internet-policy'>https://cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-sep-19-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-plans-inter-ministerial-panel-on-internet-policy</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet Governance2012-09-25T10:28:08ZNews ItemThe Humpty-Dumpty Censorship of Television in India
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-bhairav-acharya-humpty-dumpty-censorship-of-tv-in-india
<b>The Modi government’s attack on Sathiyam TV is another manifestation of the Indian state’s paranoia of the medium of film and television, and consequently, the irrational controlling impulse of the law.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article originally published in the Wire on September 8, 2015 was also mirrored on the website <a class="external-link" href="http://notacoda.net/2015/09/09/the-humpty-dumpty-censorship-of-television-in-india/">Free Speech/Privacy/Technology</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is tempting to think of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s (MIB) <a href="http://www.livelaw.in/i-b-ministrys-warning-to-channel-for-comments-on-pm-modi-delhi-hc-seeks-reply/" target="_blank">attack on Sathiyam TV</a> solely as another authoritarian exhibition of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s intolerance of criticism and dissent. It certainly is. But it is also another manifestation of the Indian state’s paranoia of the medium of film and television, and consequently, the irrational controlling impulse of the law.</p>
<p><b>Sathiyam TV’s transgressions</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sathiyam’s transgressions began more than a year ago, on May 9, 2014, when it broadcast a preacher saying of an unnamed person: “Oh Lord! Remove this satanic person from the world!” The preacher also allegedly claimed this “dreadful person” was threatening Christianity. This, the MIB reticently claims, “appeared to be targeting a political leader”, referring presumably to Prime Minister Modi, to “potentially give rise to a communally sensitive situation and incite the public to violent tendencies.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The MIB was also offended by a “senior journalist” who, on the same day, participated in a non-religious news discussion to allegedly claim Modi “engineered crowds at his rallies” and used “his oratorical skills to make people believe his false statements”. According to the MIB, this was defamatory and “appeared to malign and slander the Prime Minister which was repugnant to (his) esteemed office”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For these two incidents, Sathiyam was served a show-cause notice on 16 December 2014 which it responded to the next day, denying the MIB’s claims. Sathiyam was heard in-person by a committee of bureaucrats on 6 February 2015. On 12 May 2015, the MIB handed Sathiyam an official <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/277493911/Warning-Sathiyam-TV-Channel-12th-May-2015" target="_blank">an official “Warning”</a> which appears to be unsupported by law. Sathiyam moved the Delhi High Court to challenge this.</p>
<p>As Sathiyam sought judicial protection, the MIB issued the channel a <a href="http://www.catchnews.com/india-news/now-airing-the-hounding-of-a-tv-channel-for-showing-modi-in-bad-light-1441303238.html" target="_blank">second warning</a> August 26, 2016 citing three more objectionable news broadcasts of: a child being subjected to cruelty by a traditional healer in <a href="http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/newborn-forced-to-walk-by-witch-doctor-in-assam-village-as-fever-cure-764554" target="_blank">Assam</a>; a gun murder inside a government hospital in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2V4B2elMjo" target="_blank">Madhya Pradesh</a>; and, a self-immolating man rushing the dais at a BJP rally in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECDV5AieD4g" target="_blank">Telangana</a>. All three news items were carried by other news channels and websites.</p>
<p><b>Governing communications</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Most news providers use multiple media to transmit their content and suffer from complex and confusing regulation. Cable television is one such medium, so is the Internet; both media swiftly evolve to follow technological change. As the law struggles to keep up, governmental anxiety at the inability to perfectly control this vast field of speech and expression frequently expresses itself through acts of overreach and censorship.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the newly-liberalised media landscape of the early 1990s, cable television sprang up in a legal vacuum. Doordarshan, the sole broadcaster, flourished in the Centre’s constitutionally-sanctioned monopoly of broadcasting which was only broken by the Supreme Court in 1995. The same year, Parliament enacted the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 (“Cable TV Act”) to create a licence regime to control cable television channels. The Cable TV Act is supplemented by the Cable Television Network Rules, 1994 (“Cable Rules”).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The state’s disquiet with communications technology is a recurring motif in modern Indian history. When the first telegraph line was laid in India, the colonial state was quick to recognize its potential for transmitting subversive speech and responded with strict controls. The fourth iteration of the telegraph law represents the colonial government’s perfection of the architecture of control. This law is the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, which continues to dominate communications governance in India today including, following a directive in 2004, broadcasting.</p>
<p><b>Vague and arbitrary law</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Cable TV Act requires cable news channels such as Sathiyam to obey a list of restrictions on content that is contained in the Cable Rules (“<a href="http://mib.nic.in/WriteReadData/documents/pc1.pdf" target="_blank">Programme Code</a>“). Failure to conform to the Programme Code can result in seizure of equipment and imprisonment; but, more importantly, creates the momentum necessary to invoke the broad powers of censorship to ban a programme, channel, or even the cable operator. But the Programme Code is littered with vague phrases and undefined terms that can mean anything the government wants them to mean.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">By its first warning of May 12, 2015, the MIB claimed Sathiyam violated four rules in the Programme Code. These include rule 6(1)(c) which bans visuals or words “which promote communal attitudes”; rule 6(1)(d) which bans “deliberate, false and suggestive innuendos and half-truths”; rule 6(1)(e) which bans anything “which promotes anti-national attitudes”; and, rule 6(1)(i) which bans anything that “criticises, maligns or slanders any…person or…groups, segments of social, public and moral life of the country” <i>(sic).</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The rest of the Programme Code is no less imprecise. It proscribes content that “offends against good taste” and “reflects a slandering, ironical and snobbish attitude” against communities. On the face of it, several provisions of the Programme Code travel beyond the permissible restrictions on free speech listed in Article 19(2) of the Constitution to question their validity. The fiasco of implementing the vague provisions of the erstwhile section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 is a recent reminder of the dangers presented by poorly-drafted censorship law – which is why it was struck down by the Supreme Court for infringing the right to free speech. The Programme Code is an older creation, it has simply evaded scrutiny for two decades.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The arbitrariness of the Programme Code is amplified manifold by the authorities responsible for interpreting and implementing it. An Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) of bureaucrats, supposedly a recommendatory body, interprets the Programme Code before the MIB takes action against channels. This is an executive power of censorship that must survive legal and constitutional scrutiny, but has never been subjected to it. Curiously, the courts have shied away from a proper analysis of the Programme Code and the IMC.</p>
<p><b>Judicial challenges</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In 2011, a single judge of the Delhi High Court in the <a href="http://indiankanoon.org/doc/132453/" target="_blank"><i>Star India</i></a> case (2011) was asked to examine the legitimacy of the IMC as well as four separate clauses of the Programme Code including rule 6(1)(i), which has been invoked against Sathiyam. But the judge neatly sidestepped the issues. This feat of judicial adroitness was made possible by the crass indecency of the content in question, which could be reasonably restricted. Since the show clearly attracted at least one ground of legitimate censorship, the judge saw no cause to examine the other provisions of the Programme Code or even the composition of the IMC.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This judicial restraint has proved detrimental. In May 2013, another single judge of the Delhi High Court, who was asked by Comedy Central to adjudge the validity of the IMC’s decision-making process, relied on <i>Star India</i> (2011) to uphold the MIB’s action against the channel. The channel’s appeal to the Supreme Court is currently pending. If the Supreme Court decides to examine the validity of the IMC, the Delhi High Court may put aside Sathiyam’s petition to wait for legal clarity.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As it happens, in the <a href="http://indiankanoon.org/doc/110813550/"><i>Shreya Singhal</i></a> case (2015) that struck down section 66A of the IT Act, the Supreme Court has an excellent precedent to follow to demand clarity and precision from the Programme Code, perhaps even strike it down, as well as due process from the MIB. On the accusation of defaming the Prime Minister, probably the only clearly stated objection by the MIB, the Supreme Court’s past law is clear: public servants cannot, for non-personal acts, claim defamation.</p>
<p><b>Censorship by blunt force</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Beyond the IMC’s advisories and warnings, the Cable TV Act contains two broad powers of censorship. The first empowerment in section 19 enables a government official to ban any programme or channel if it fails to comply with the Programme Code or, “if it is likely to promote, on grounds of religion, race, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, linguistic or regional groups or castes or communities or which is likely to disturb the public tranquility.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second empowerment is much wider. Section 20 of the Cable TV Act permits the Central Government to ban an entire cable television operator, as opposed to a single channel or programmes within channels, if it “thinks it necessary or expedient so to do in public interest”. No reasons need be given and no grounds need be considered. Such a blunt use of force creates an overwhelming power of censorship. It is not a coincidence that section 20 resembles some provisions of nineteenth-century telegraph laws, which were designed to enable the colonial state to control the flow of information to its native subjects.</p>
<p><b>A manual for television bans</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://www.frontline.in/arts-and-culture/cinema/cut-and-thrust/article5185915.ece" target="_blank">Film</a> and television have <a href="http://thebigindianpicture.com/2013/03/the-heart-of-censorship/" target="_blank">always</a> attracted political attention and state censorship. In 1970, <a href="http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1719619/" target="_blank">Justice Hidayatullah</a> of the Supreme Court explained why: “It has been almost universally recognised that the treatment of motion pictures must be different from that of other forms of art and expression. This arises from the instant appeal of the motion picture… The motion picture is able to stir up emotions more deeply than any other product of art.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Within this historical narrative of censorship, television regulation is relatively new. <a href="http://www.indiantelevision.com/television/programming/tv-channels/regulations/ib-ministry-dictates-channels-to-follow-the-programme" target="_blank">Past governments</a> have also been quick to threaten censorship for attacking an incumbent Prime Minister. There seems to be a pan-governmental consensus that senior political leaders ought to be beyond reproach, irrespective of their words and deeds.</p>
<p>But on what grounds could the state justify these bans? Lord Atkins’ celebrated war-time dissent in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liversidge_v_Anderson" target="_blank"><i>Liversidge</i></a> (1941) offers an unlikely answer:</p>
<p>“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’”</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-bhairav-acharya-humpty-dumpty-censorship-of-tv-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-bhairav-acharya-humpty-dumpty-censorship-of-tv-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherbhairavFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet GovernanceCensorship2015-11-29T08:37:53ZBlog EntrySubmission to the Facebook Oversight Board: Policy on Cross-checks
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/submission-to-the-facebook-oversight-board-policy-on-cross-checks
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) submitted public comments to the Facebook Oversight Board on a policy consultation.</b>
<h2>Whether a cross-check system is needed?</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Recommendation for the Board</strong>: The Board should investigate the cross-check system as part of Meta’s larger problems with algorithmically amplified speech, and how such speech gets moderated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Explanation</strong>: The issues surrounding Meta’s cross-check system are not an isolated phenomena, but rather a reflection of the problems of algorithmically amplified speech, as well the lack of transparency in the company’s content moderation processes at large. At the outset, it must be stated that the majority of information on the cross-check system only became available after the media <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerberg-elite-rules-11631541353?mod=article_inline">reports</a> published by the Wall Street Journal. While these reports have been extensive in documenting various aspects of the system, there is no guarantee that the disclosures obtained by them provides the complete picture regarding the system. Further, given that Meta has been found to purposely mislead the Board and the public on how the cross-check system operates, it is worth investigating the incentives that necessitate the cross-check system in the first place.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Meta claims that the cross-check system works as a check for false positives: they “employ additional reviews for high-visibility content that may violate our policies.” Essentially they want to make sure that content that stays up on the platform and reaches a large audience, is following their content guidelines. However, previous disclosures have <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346">proven</a> policy executives have prioritized the company’s ‘business interests’ over removing content that violates their policies; and have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang">waited to act on known problematic content</a> until significant external pressure was built up, including in India. In this context, the cross-check system seems less like a measure designed to protect users who might be exposed to problematic content, and more as a measure for managing public perception of the company.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Thus the Board should investigate both how content gains an audience on the platform, and how it gets moderated. Previous <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang">whistleblower disclosures</a> have shown that the mechanics of algorithmically amplified speech, which prioritizes <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/">engagement and growth over safety</a>, are easily taken advantage of by bad actors to promote their viewpoints through artificially induced virality. The cross-check system and other measures of content moderation at scale would not be needed if it was harder to spread problematic content on the platform in the first place. Instead of focusing only on one specific system, the Board needs to urge Meta to re-evaluate the incentives that drive content sharing on the platform and come up with ways that make the platform safer.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Meta’s Obligations under Human Rights Law</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Recommendation for the Board: </strong>The Board must consider the cross-check system to be violative of Meta’s obligations under the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Additionally, the cross-check ranker must be incorporated with Meta’s commitments towards human rights, as outlined in its Corporate Human Rights Policy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Explanation: Meta’s content moderation, and by extension, its cross-check system, is bound by both international human rights law as well as the Board’s past decisions. At the outset, The system fails the three-pronged test of legality, legitimacy and necessity and proportionality, as delineated under Article 19(3) of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Firstly, this system has been “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerberg-elite-rules-11631541353?mod=article_inline">scattered throughout the company, without clear governance or ownership</a>”, which violates the legality principle, since there is no clear guidance on what sort of speech, or which classes of users, would deserve the treatment of this system. Secondly, there is no understanding about the legitimacy of aims with which this system had been set up in the first place, beyond Meta’s own assertions, which have been <a href="https://www.oversightboard.com/news/215139350722703-oversight-board-demands-more-transparency-from-facebook/">countered</a> by evidence to the contrary. Thirdly, the necessity and proportionality of the restriction has to be <a href="https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/FB-691QAMHJ">read along</a> with the <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/freedomopinion/articles19-20/pages/index.aspx">Rabat Plan of Action</a>, which requires that for a statement to become a criminal offense, a six-pronged test of threshold is to be applied: a) the social and political context, b) the speaker’s position or status in the society, c) intent to incite the audience against a target group, d) content and form of the speech, e) extent of its dissemination and f) likelihood of harm. As news reports have indicated, Meta has been utilizing the cross-check system to privilege speech from influential users, and in the process, have shielded inflammatory, inciting speech that would have otherwise qualified the Rabat threshold. As such, the third requirement is not fulfilled either.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Additionally, Meta’s own <a href="https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Facebooks-Corporate-Human-Rights-Policy.pdf">Corporate Human Rights Policy</a> commits to respecting human rights in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Therefore, the cross-check ranker must incorporate these existing commitments to human rights, including:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify;">The right to freedom of expression:, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression report <a href="https://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/38/35">A/HRC/38/35</a> (2018); <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25729&LangID=E">Joint Statement of international freedom of expression monitors on COVID-19 (March, 2020)</a>.</li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression addresses the regulation of user-generated online content.</p>
<p>The Joint Statement issued regarding Governmental promotion and protection of access to and free flow of information during the pandemic.</p>
<ul>
<li>The right to non-discrimination: International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (<a href="https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx">ICERD</a>), Articles 1 and 4.</li></ul>
<p>Article 1 of the ICERD defines racial discrimination.</p>
<p>Article 4 of the ICERD condemns propaganda and organisations that attempt to justify discrimination or are based on the idea of racial supremacism.</p>
<ul>
<li>Participation in public affairs and the right to vote: ICCPR Article 25.</li>
<li>The right to remedy: General Comment No. 31, Human Rights Committee (2004) (<a href="https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CCPR%2fC%2f21%2fRev.1%2fAdd.13&Lang=en">General Comment 31</a>); UNGPs, Principle 22.</li></ul>
<p>The General Comment discusses the nature of the general legal obligation imposed on State Parties to the Covenant.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Guiding Principle 22 states that where business enterprises identify that they have caused or contributed to adverse impacts, they should provide for or cooperate in their remediation through legitimate processes.</p>
<h2>Meta’s obligations to avoid political bias and false positives in its cross-check system</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Recommendation for the Board: </strong>The Board must urge Meta to adopt and implement the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability to ensure that it is open about risks to user rights when there is involvement from the State in content moderation. Additionally, the Board must ask Meta to undertake a diversity and human rights audit of its existing policy teams, and commit to regular cultural training for its staff. Finally, the Board must investigate the potential conflicts of interest that arise when Meta’s policy team has any sort of nexus with political parties, and how that might impact content moderation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Explanation: For the cross-check system to be free from biases, it is important for Meta to come clear to the Board regarding the rationale, standards and processes of the cross check review, and report on the relative error rates of determinations made through cross check compared with ordinary enforcement procedures. It also needs to disclose to the Board in which particular situations it uses the system and in which it does not. Principle 4 under the Foundational Principles of the <a href="https://santaclaraprinciples.org/">Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation</a> encourage companies to realize the risk to user rights when there is involvement from the State in processes of content moderation and asks companies to makes users aware that: a) a state actor has requested/participated in an action on their content/account, and b) the company believes that the action was needed as per the relevant law. Users should be allowed access to any rules or policies, formal or informal work relationships that the company holds with state actors in terms of content regulation, the process of flagging accounts/content and state requests to action.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Board must consider that erroneous lack of action (false positives) might not always be a system's flaw, but a larger, structural issue regarding how policy teams at Meta functions. As previous disclosures have <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346">proven</a>, the contours of what sort of violating content gets to stay up on the platform has been ideologically and politically coloured, as policy executives have prioritized the company’s ‘business interests’ over social harmony. In such light, it is not sufficient to simply propose better transparency and accountability measures for Meta to adopt within its content moderation processes to avoid political bias. Rather, the Board’s recommendations must focus on the structural aspect of the human moderator and policy team that is behind these processes. The Board must ask Meta to a) urgently undertake a diversity and human rights audit of its existing team and its hiring processes, b) commit to regular training to ensure that their policy staffs are culturally literate in the socio-political regions they work in. Further, the Board must seriously investigate the potential <a href="https://time.com/5883993/india-facebook-hate-speech-bjp/">conflicts of interest</a> that happen when regional policy teams of Meta, with nexus to political parties, are also tasked with regulating content from representatives of these parties, and how that impacts the moderation processes at large.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Finally, in case decision <a href="https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/FB-691QAMHJ">2021-001-FB-FBR</a>, the Board made a number of recommendations to Meta which must be implemented in the current situation, including: a) considering the political context while looking at potential risks, b) employment of specialized staff in content moderation while evaluating political speech from influential users, c) familiarity with the political and linguistic context d) absence of any interference and undue influence, e) public explanation regarding the rules Meta uses when imposing sanctions against influential users and f) the sanctions being time-bound.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Transparency of the cross-check system</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Recommendation for the Board: </strong>The Board must urge Meta to adopt and implement the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability to increase the transparency of its cross-check system.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Explanation: </strong>There are ways in which Meta can increase the transparency of not only the cross-check system, but the content moderation process in general. The following recommendations draw from <a href="https://santaclaraprinciples.org/">The Santa Clara Principles</a> and the Board’s own previous decisions:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Considering Principle 2 of the Santa Clara Principles: Understandable Rules and Policies, Meta should ensure that the policies and rules governing moderation of content and user behaviors on Facebook are<strong> clear, easily understandable, and available in the languages</strong> in which the user operates.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Drawing from Principle 5 on Integrity and Explainability and from the Board’s recommendations in case decision <a href="https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/FB-691QAMHJ">2021-001-FB-FBR</a> which advises Meta to“<em>Provide users with accessible information on how many violations, strikes and penalties have been assessed against them, and the consequences that will follow future violations</em>”, Meta should be able to <strong>explain the content moderation decisions to users in all cases</strong>: when under review, when the decision has been made to leave the content up, or take it down. We recommend that Meta keeps a publicly accessible running tally of the number of moderation decisions made on a piece of content till date with their explanations. This would allow third parties (like journalists, activists, researchers and the OSB) to keep Facebook accountable when it does not follow its own policies, as has previously been the case.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In the same case decision, the Board has also previously recommended that Meta “<em>Produce more information to help users understand and evaluate the process and criteria for applying the newsworthiness allowance, including how it applies to influential accounts. The company should also clearly explain the rationale, standards and processes of the cross-check review, and report on the relative error rates of determinations made through cross-checking compared with ordinary enforcement procedures.</em>” Thus, Meta should <strong>publicly explain the cross check system </strong>in detail with examples, and make public the list of attributes that qualify a piece of content for secondary review.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Operational Principles further provide actionable steps that Meta can take to improve the transparency of their content moderation systems. Drawing from Principle 2: Notice and Principle 3: Appeals, Meta should make a satisfactory <strong>appeals process available </strong>to users - whether they be decisions to leave up or takedown content. The appeals process should be handled by context aware teams. Meta should then <strong>publish the results</strong> of the cross check system and the appeals processes as part of their transparency reports including data like total content actioned, rate of success in appeals and cross check process, decisions overturned and preserved etc, which would also satisfy the first Operational Principle: Numbers.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Resources needed to improve the system for users and entities who do not post in English</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Recommendations for the Board: </strong>The Board must urge Meta to urgently invest in resources to expand Meta’s content moderation services into the local contexts in which the company operates and invest in training data for local languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Explanation: </strong>The cross-check system is not a fundamentally different problem than content moderation. It has been shown time and time again that Meta’s handling of content from non-Western, non-English language contexts is severely lacking. It has been shown how content hosted on the platform has been used to<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang"> inflame existing tensions in developing countries</a>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-services-are-used-to-spread-religious-hatred-in-india-internal-documents-show-11635016354?mod=article_inline">promote religious hatred in India</a>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/burn-the-houses-rohingya-survivors-recount-the-day-soldiers-killed-hundreds-1526048545?mod=article_inline">genocide in Mynmar</a>, and continue to support <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-drug-cartels-human-traffickers-response-is-weak-documents-11631812953?mod=article_inline">human traffickers and drug cartels</a> on the platform even when these issues have been identified.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">There is an urgent need to invest resources to expand Meta’s content moderation services into the local contexts in which the company operates. The company should make all policies and rule documents available in the languages of its users; invest in creating automated tools that are capable of flagging content that is not posted in English; and add people familiar with the local contexts to provide context aware second level reviews. The Facebook Files show that even according to company engineering, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ai-enforce-rules-engineers-doubtful-artificial-intelligence-11634338184?mod=article_inline">automated content moderation</a> is still not very effective in identifying hate speech and other harmful content. Meta should focus on hiring, training and retaining human moderators who have knowledge of local contexts. Bias training of all content moderators, but especially those who will participate in the second level reviews in the cross check system is also extremely important to ensure acceptable decisions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Additionally, in keeping with Meta’s human rights commitments, the company should develop and publish a policy for responding to human rights violations when they are pointed out by activists, researchers, journalists and employees as a matter of due process. It should not wait for a negative news cycle to stir them into action <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-fake-engagement-whistleblower-sophie-zhang">as it seems to have done in previous cases</a>.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Benefits and limitations of automated technologies</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Meta <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/13/21562596/facebook-ai-moderation%5C">recently changed</a> its moderation practice wherein it uses technology to prioritize content for human reviewers based on their severity index. Facebook <a href="https://transparency.fb.com/policies/improving/prioritizing-content-review/">has not specified</a> the technology it uses to prioritize high-severity content but its research record shows that it <a href="https://ai.facebook.com/blog/the-shift-to-generalized-ai-to-better-identify-violating-content">uses</a> a host of automated <a href="https://ai.facebook.com/tools#frameworks-and-tools">frameworks and tools</a> to detect violating content, including image recognition tools, object detection tools, natural language processing models, speech models and reasoning models. One such model is the <a href="https://ai.facebook.com/blog/community-standards-report/">Whole Post Integrity Embeddings</a> (“WPIE”) which can judge various elements in a given post (caption, comments, OCR, image etc.) to work out the context and the content of the post. Facebook also uses image matching models (SimSearchNet++) that are trained to match variations of an image with a high degree of precision and improved recall; multi-lingual masked language models on cross-lingual understanding such as <a href="https://ai.facebook.com/blog/-xlm-r-state-of-the-art-cross-lingual-understanding-through-self-supervision/">XLM-R</a> that can accurately identify hate-speech and other policy-violating content across a wide range of languages. More recently, Facebook introduced its machine translation model called the <a href="https://analyticsindiamag.com/facebooks-new-machine-translation-model-works-without-help-of-english-data/">M2M-100</a> whose goal is to perform bidirectional translation between 7000 languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Despite the advances in this field, there are inherent <a href="https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/157249/cambridge-consultants-ai-content-moderation.pdf">limitations</a> of such automated tools. <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/27/18242724/facebook-moderation-ai-artificial-intelligence-platforms">Experts</a> have repeatedly maintained that AI will get better at understanding context but it will not replace human moderators for the foreseeable future. One such instance where these limitations were <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/facebook-content-moderation-automation/">exposed</a> was during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Facebook sent its human moderators home - the number of removals flagged as hate speech on its platform more than doubled to 22.5 million in the second quarter of 2020 but the number of successful content appeals was dropped to 12,600 from the 2.3 million figure for the first three months of 2020.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ai-enforce-rules-engineers-doubtful-artificial-intelligence-11634338184?mod=article_inline">The Facebook Files</a> show that Meta’s AI cannot consistently identify first-person shooting videos, racist rants and even the difference between cockfighting and car crashes. Its automated systems are only capable of removing posts that generate just 3% to 5% of the views of hate speech on the platform and 0.6% of all content that violates Meta’s policies against violence and incitement. As such, it is difficult to accept the company’s claim that nearly all of the hate speech it takes down was discovered by AI before it was reported by users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, the benefits of such technology cannot be discounted, especially when one considers automated technology as a way of reducing <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona">trauma</a> for human moderators. Using AI for prioritizing content for review can turn out to be effective for human moderators as it can increase their efficiency and reduce harmful effects of content moderation on them. Additionally, it can also limit the exposure of harmful content to internet users. Moreover, AI can also reduce the impact of harmful content on human moderators by allocating content to moderators on the basis of their exposure history. Theoretically, if the company’s claims are to be believed, using automated technology for prioritizing content for review can help to improve the mental health of Facebook’s human moderators.</p>
<hr />
<p>Click to download the file <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/policy-on-cross-checks">here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/submission-to-the-facebook-oversight-board-policy-on-cross-checks'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/submission-to-the-facebook-oversight-board-policy-on-cross-checks</a>
</p>
No publisher[in alphabetical order] Anamika Kundu, Digvijay Singh, Divyansha Sehgal and Torsha SarkarFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet FreedomFacebookInternet Governance2022-02-09T05:31:32ZBlog Entry'Anonymous' hackers to protest Indian Internet laws
https://cis-india.org/news/anonymous-hackers-to-protest-indian-internet-laws
<b>Global hacking movement Anonymous has called for protesters to take to the streets in 16 cities around India on Saturday over what it considers growing government censorship of the Internet, writes Pratap Chakravarty. </b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gsnDdnLf9f_PmycvKCR-5aHsJiNw?docId=CNG.56f38ef15f6205d33c4a9b392db46ad0.551">This was published in AFP on June 8, 2012</a></p>
<p>The call for demonstrations by the Indian arm of the group follows a
March 29 court order issued in the southern city of Chennai demanding 15
Indian Internet providers block access to file-sharing websites such as
Pirate Bay.</p>
<p>The order has resulted in access being denied to a host of websites
that carry pirated films and music among other legal content, including <a class="external-link" href="http://www.isohunt.com/">www.isohunt.com</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.pastebin.com/">www.pastebin.com</a>.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, the Anonymous forum fired an opening shot by attacking
the website of state-run telecom provider MTNL, pasting the logo of the
group -- the mask of 17th century revolutionary Guy Fawkes -- on <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mtnl.net.in">www.mtnl.net.in</a>.</p>
<p>In an open letter the same day, the group accused the government of
trying to create a "Great Indian Firewall" to establish control on the
web and issuing a "declaration of war from yourself... to us."</p>
<p>Internet users and supporters have been asked to join peaceful
rallies in cities including the capital New Delhi and the tech hub of
Bangalore, with detailed instructions issued online to participants.</p>
<p>Tech website <a class="external-link" href="http://www.pluggd.in/">www.pluggd.in</a>
reported the demonstrators have been asked to wear Guy Fawkes' masks,
download a recorded message to play to police, and are to chant "United
as one! Divided as zero! We are Anonymous! We are legion!"</p>
<p>Concerns about Internet freedom in India go beyond the court order in
Chennai, however, and stem from an update to India's Information
Technology Act that was given by the IT and communications ministry in
April last year.</p>
<p>The new rules regulating Internet companies -- providers, websites
and search engines -- instruct them that they must remove "disparaging"
or "blasphemous" content within 36 hours if they receive a complaint by
an "affected person".</p>
<p>Groups such as the Center for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based
research and advocacy group, have waged a year-long campaign for
amendments to the rules, which were quietly released in April.</p>
<p>Industry groups have also objected, saying they are unclear on the
changes which are in any case impossible to implement when it comes to
acting on individual complaints about specific content.</p>
<p>"A lot of education is required in this field," secretary of the
Internet Service Providers Association of India S.P. Jairath told AFP.</p>
<p>The government has also become embroiled in a row with social
networks after Telecoms Minister Kapil Sibal held a series of meetings
with IT giants Google, Yahoo! and Facebook last year to discuss the
pre-screening of content.</p>
<p>The minister was said to have shown Internet executives examples of
obscene images found online that risked offending Muslims or defamed
politicians, including his boss, the head of the ruling Congress party,
Sonia Gandhi.</p>
<p>Since these meetings, 19 Internet firms including Google, Yahoo! and
Facebook have been targeted in criminal and civil cases lodged in lower
courts, holding them responsible for content posted by users of their
platforms.</p>
<p>Anonymous is a secretive "hacker-activist" network and is thought to
be a loosely knit collective with no clearly defined leadership
structure.</p>
<p>It has claimed dozens of online attacks on sites ranging from the
Vatican to Los Angeles Police Canine Association, but is increasingly
the target of law enforcement agencies who have arrested dozens of
members.</p>
<hr />
<p>The above was published in the following places as well:</p>
<ol><li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/anonymous-hackers-call-for-protests-across-india-today-against-internet-censorship-229238">NDTV</a>, June 9, 2012</li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://post.jagran.com/anonymous-to-protest-internet-policing-1339243820">Jagran Post</a>, June 9, 2012</li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-06-09/internet/32140515_1_internet-firms-websites-internet-companies">The Times of India</a>, June 9, 2012</li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2012/06/09185541/8216Anonymous8217-activi.html">LiveMint</a>, June 9, 2012</li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-06-09/news/32140719_1_government-websites-anonymous-facebook-page">Economic Times</a>, June 9, 2012<br /></li></ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/anonymous-hackers-to-protest-indian-internet-laws'>https://cis-india.org/news/anonymous-hackers-to-protest-indian-internet-laws</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-06-18T04:55:51ZNews Item