Centre for Internet and Society

Here is why government twitter handles have been posting offensive and partisan messages

praskrishna — 2016-10-16T03:24:45Z

You have failed us big time Mr Kejriwal, for your petty political gains you can become headlines for Pakistani press,” read a tweet on October 5 from @IndiaPostOffice, the official twitter handle of the Indian postal service.

The article by Danish Raza was published in the Hindustan Times on October 15, 2016. Nishant Shah was quoted.

It was a reference to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal urging the Prime Minister to counter Pakistan’s propaganda over surgical strikes.

Within hours, India Post tweeted an apology saying that the account was hacked.

This is the latest in a series of opinions and statements posted from official twitter handles of government departments and bodies. Of late, the Twitter handles meant to broadcast information related to government programmes have appeared like personal accounts tweeting slander and criticism.

Last month, the Twitter handle of Digital India tweeted a poem in Hindi calling on the Indian Army to persistently fire at protesters in Kashmir.

In August, the Twitter handle of Startup India retweeted a post suggesting that the Indian Army should ‘take care’ of #Presstitutes, a reference to sections of Indian media critical of the government.

The tweets expose loopholes in the government’s social media policy and raise questions about the norms followed in the recruitment of social media professionals for ministries and government institutions.

Work in Progress

The process of adopting new tools is work in progress. While the government agencies are trying to leverage social media to enhance citizen engagement, for the vast majority of government bodies, it is unexplored territory. Babus who have traditionally been dealing in paperwork and file notings are overwhelmed to see hash tags and trends. With a tech- savvy Prime Minister at the helm, every government department is trying to increase its digital footprint. At the same time, they face the challenge of reinterpreting existing work ethics and codes of conduct and applying them to the use of social media. Ministries such as the Ministry of External Affairs, Information & Broadcasting and the Prime Minister’s Office which have cohesive programmes and big mandate, have separate social media wings of their own with well- defined protocols. But these are exceptions.

Overall, the government bodies lack social media guidelines for their own efforts or which others can learn from. According to Chinmayi Arun, executive director, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi, mistakes are bound to happen given that everyone is new to social media. But it should be non-negotiable that when anything is said using an official governmental handle, the government should take more responsibility than just saying ‘oops’. “One of course is a clear and unequivocal statement apologising and taking back whatever was said. However, it should take pro-active measures to train and test people who handle its public-facing accounts and publish a clear monitoring and accountability mechanism by which they can be called to account. It should not be open to anyone to misuse the government’s official handles in this manner,” said Arun.

One of the areas where the lack of sensitisation is apparent is the usage of the same mobile device for multiple twitter handles – the most common reason for such goof-ups cited by social media consultants attached to various government departments. “I believe these were inadvertently posted by people handling these accounts. It may neither have been their mandate nor their intention. It happens when the person has configured multiple twitter handles from the same device and ends up posting from the wrong account,” said Amit Malviya, BJP’s National Convener, IT.

The majority of ministries and government departments do not give phones to members of the social media teams. It is up to the individual to use his personal device or get an additional one to manage the professional handle (s). A mistake will happen if a comment which was to be posted from the personal handle is posted from the official handle.

Twitter Goof-ups from GoI Accounts

“Because of the personalised and individual nature of social media, it is easy to forget that they are representing an institution and not themselves when using these handles. This also suggests the lack of public usage training in these organisations, and the need to educate our public actors in using social media with more responsibility as office bearers of an institution rather than a personal expression or an opinion,” said Nishant Shah, co-founder of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

Another issue is that access to the account is given to multiple people. “Each one of them brings their individual personality and politics to their operation of the handle,” said Shah.

Hiring Issues

Part of the problem lies in the fact that there is no standard protocol on who can access the twitter handle of Indian government bodies and how this person or team is hired.

A few ministries (example: the ministry of railways) have a team comprising of government employees and staff of private agencies handling their account. Others have outsourced the job to agencies.

During the campaigning for the 2009 election, political parties got outside expertise to mark their presence online. The selection parameters of social media consultants – established public relations firms in some cases and individuals in others – was not uniform.

Unlike the traditional public relations officers who are from the Indian Information Services cadre, the social media consultants were selected based on their expertise in the field, political affiliation, and proximity to a party or leader.

Those who started handling social media accounts of political parties and leaders included trolls and social media influencers. “Parties got youngsters who were politically motivated and willing to work for political parties. They became cheaper alternatives for social media experts,” said Ishan Russel, political communication consultant.

After the NDA came to power, almost every ministry outsourced its digital expertise to agencies. Many individuals who were earlier directly working with leaders and parties got back with them via agencies. “If an agency is looking for people to handle the twitter account or Facebook page of a certain ministry in the BJP government, then those who are politically inclined towards the BJP will apply for the vacancies and their chances of getting hired are also much higher than someone who is neutral or known to be an AAP sympathiser,” said Vikas Pandey, 32-year-old software engineer, who headed the “I Support Namo” campaign on Facebook and Twitter, as a volunteer for the BJP.

Last year, the Prime Minister felicitated more than a dozen social media enthusiasts, including Vikas. The move raised eyebrows because many felt that the government was encouraging trolls. “It illuminates the fact that trolls have found gainful employment in the Government of India. Also that the entire edifice of the centre is being taken over by woefully undereducated bigots,” said Swati Chaturvedi, senior journalist and author.

Agency, the Soft Target

Till the time the government staff is well versed with social media tools, attributing the mistakes to an ‘outside agency’ appears to be the norm.

In the case of the twitter goof-up involving Startup India, Commerce and Industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman blamed a private agency that was managing the account of Startup India. “The retweets were done by an employee of the agency hired by the department of industrial policy and promotion. The person assigned by the agency for this particular job is not decided by the department and is the sole prerogative of the agency,” she said.

S Radha Chauhan, CEO of National e-Governance Division, attributed the controversial post from Digital India’s twitter handle to an agency called Trivone. “The person responsible had mistakenly tweeted from the official handle what he wanted to tweet from his personal account,” said Chauhan.

Those familiar with the functioning of the government’s social media verticals say that agencies are mentioned to cover up for mistakes often committed by someone from the government staff. “When in crisis, blame the agency, is the thumbrule the government follows. The fact is that each twitter post is approved by the client before it is posted,” said a senior executive with a digital marketing firm attached to a ministry which has recently earned lot of praise for its social media initiatives.

Nishtha Arora, social media and digital consultant in a reputed ad agency, was handling a political account till very recently. She said that the client required her to just randomly tweet or RT to be heard by the followers of a tech-savvy minister and be his digital mouthpiece. “I often had to draft tweets which looked like press releases,” she said.

“Digital faux pas is blamed on to someone who might be an expert in the field but yet has to bow down to the client pressure so that their agenda for the day is met and the said government body or ministry remains in the news,” she added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-danish-raza-october-15-2016-here-is-why-government-twitter-handles-have-been-posting-offensive-and-partisan-messages

Google, Facebook will not place ads on sites distributing fake news

praskrishna — 2016-11-15T13:59:40Z

Google plans to update its AdSense program policies to prevent placement of its ads on sites distributing fake news.

The article by John Riberio originally published by IDG News Service was mirrored on CIO on November 14, 2016. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Facebook also said Monday it had updated the policy for its Audience Network, which places ads on websites and mobile apps, to explicitly clarify that it applies to fake news.

“In accordance with the Audience Network Policy, we do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news,” Facebook said in a statement. The company said its team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance.

False news stories have become a sore point after the U.S. presidential elections with critics blaming internet companies like Twitter and Facebook for having had an influence on the outcome of the elections as a result of the fake content.

The controversy also reflects concerns about the growing power of social networks to influence people and events, as well as help people to communicate and organize. Facebook promotes democracy by letting candidates communicate directly with people, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said recently in an interview.

Google had its own embarrassing moments on Sunday with a false story that claimed that President-elect Donald Trump had won the popular vote in the U.S. presidential elections figuring atop some Google search results. Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is leading in the popular vote.

“We've been working on an update to our publisher policies and will start prohibiting Google ads from being placed on misrepresentative content, just as we disallow misrepresentation in our ads policies,” Google said Monday in a statement. “Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property.”

Google evidently expects that the threat of a cut in revenue from ads will dissuade sites from publishing fake content.

Zuckerberg has described as “crazy” the criticism that fake news on Facebook's news feed had influenced the vote in favor of Trump. “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” Zuckerberg said in a post over the weekend. The hoaxes are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics, he added.

Identifying the "truth" is complicated, as while some hoaxes can be clearly identified, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted, or expresses a view that some people will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when it is factual, Zuckerberg wrote.

There are concerns that the monitoring of sites for fake news and the penalties could give internet companies more power. "We have to be wary of Facebook and Google being allowed to decide what's 'fake' and what's 'true' news. That only increases their power," said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet & Society in Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/cio-november-14-2016-john-riberio-google-facebook-will-not-place-ads-on-sites-distributing-fake-news

How The U.K. Got A Better Deal From Facebook Than India Did

praskrishna — 2016-11-18T01:56:49Z

The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and India’s Karmanya Sareen shared a similar concern – how messenger application WhatsApp’s decision to share user data with parent Facebook is a violation of the promise of privacy.

The blog post by Payaswini Upadhyay was published in Bloomberg Quint on November 17, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Last week, Facebook agreed to address the concerns of the ICO; in India, it didn’t have to.

WhatsApp: New Privacy Policy

In August 2016, WhatsApp issued a revised privacy policy that allowed it to share user information with parent company Facebook. Any user who didn’t want her information to be shared with Facebook had a 30-day period to opt out of the policy. Opting out meant that a user’s account information would not be shared with Facebook to improve ads and product experiences. But, there was a caveat.

The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities.
WhatsApp Support Team statement on its website

Facebook’s Commitment To ICO

The ICO decided to delve deeper into what Facebook intended to do with the WhatsApp user data. Elizabeth Denham, Information Commissioner, ICO stated in her blog that users haven’t been given enough information about what Facebook plans to do with the information, and WhatsApp hasn’t got valid consent from users to share the information.

I also believe users should be given ongoing control over how their information is used, not just a 30-day window.
Elizabeth Denham, Information Commissioner, ICO

Denham further elaborated ICO’s stand - that it’s important users have control over their personal information, even if services don’t charge them a fee.

We’ve set out the law clearly to Facebook, and we’re pleased that they’ve agreed to pause using data from U.K. WhatsApp users for advertisements or product improvement purposes.
Elizabeth Denham, Information Commissioner, ICO

The ICO has now asked Facebook and WhatsApp to sign an undertaking committing to better explaining to users how their data will be used, and to giving users ongoing control over that information. Additionally, the ICO also wants WhatsApp to give users an unambiguous choice before Facebook starts using that information and for them to be given the opportunity to change that decision at any point in the future. Facebook and WhatsApp are yet to agree to this, Denham stated.

If Facebook starts using the data without valid consent, it may face enforcement action from my office.
Elizabeth Denham, Information Commissioner, ICO

In the U.K., protections in the European Data Protection Directive have been incorporated into local law via the Data Protection Act 1998. The ICO is both the privacy regulator and the transparency (right to information) regulator, Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society pointed out. The regulator can issue enforcement notices and also fine errant actors in the market place, he said.

This is a regulator with expertise, experience and teeth. Come May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation will come into force and this will give more comprehensive powers to the regulator to investigate and remedy cases like this. The regulator will take each principle from the Directive or Regulation and examine Facebook’s actions comprehensively before deciding on a response.
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society

For example, if the regulator determines that the principle of choice and consent has not been complied with, it can force Facebook to reverse its decisions and provide greater transparency and clearer choices, Abraham added.

Karmanya Sareen’s Grievance

Back home in India, just two months ago, Karmanya Sareen, a WhatsApp user, argued before the Delhi High Court against the company’s new privacy policy. The argument was that WhatsApp’s August 2016 notice to its users about the proposed change in the privacy policy violated the fundamental rights of users under Article 21 of the Constitution. Article 21 promises protection of life and personal liberty.

Proposed change in the privacy policy of WhatsApp would result in altering/changing the most valuable, basic and essential feature of WhatsApp i.e. the complete protection provided to the privacy of details and data of its users.
Karmanya Sareen vs Union of India

The Delhi High Court struck down the Article 21 argument saying that the Supreme Court was still deliberating over including right to privacy as a fundamental right. It also pointed to WhatsApp’s 2012 Privacy Policy that allowed the company to transfer user information in case of an acquisition or merger with a third party. The 2012 policy also allowed WhatsApp to change the terms periodically.

Consequently, the Delhi High Court held that it is not open to the users now to contend that WhatsApp should be compelled to continue the same terms of service. However, the court gave WhatsApp two directions to protect users.

WhatsApp to delete from its servers and not share with Facebook or its group companies any information belonging to users who delete their account.

Users who continue to be on WhatsApp, their existing information up to September 25, 2016 cannot be shared with Facebook or any of its group companies.

Did The Delhi High Court Go Easy On Facebook And WhatsApp?

Apar Gupta, an advocate specializing in information technology, points out that the directions given by the Delhi High Court to WhatsApp did not contemplate any additional protection to a user than what was already provided by WhatsApp.

The Delhi Court essentially reproduced WhatsApp’s privacy policy. It did not compel or provide any additional safeguard.
Apar Gupta, Lawyer

Apar attributes this to the absence of a regulatory framework.

The lack of substantive safeguard and enforcement framework in India led to the Delhi High Court upholding WhatsApp’s new privacy policy.
Apar Gupta, Lawyer

Abraham added that the court did not examine the privacy policy from the perspective of data protection principles as would have been the case in EU or any other jurisdictions with a proper data protection law.

The court too admitted this in its order that there existed a regulatory vacuum in India and asked TRAI to look into the matter. Facebook did not respond to BloombergQuint’s query on whether it would implement its U.K. commitments in India as well.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bloomberg-quint-november-17-2016-payaswini-upadhyay-how-the-uk-got-a-better-deal-from-facebook-than-india-did

India bans social media in Kashmir for one month

praskrishna — 2017-04-27T16:09:56Z

Authorities in Indian-controlled Kashmir have banned 22 social media sites including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter in an effort to calm tensions in the disputed region.

The article was published in the Telegraph on April 27, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The government said Wednesday that the one-month ban was necessary for public safety because social media were being "misused by anti-national and anti-social elements." Videos depicting the alleged abuse of Kashmiris by Indian forces fueled protests have been shown on social media in recent days.

"It's being felt that continued misuse of social networking sites and instant messaging services is likely to be detrimental to the interests of peace and tranquility in the state," the public order said.

The sites remained online Thursday as the local telecom company struggled to block them.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director for the Indian advocacy group the Center for Internet and Society, called the ban a "blow to freedom of speech" and "legally unprecedented in India."

An official with Kashmir's state-owned telecom company, Bharat Sanchar Nigam, said engineers were still working on shutting down the 22 sites, including Facebook and Twitter, but so far had been unable to do so without freezing the internet across the Himalayan region. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give technical details of the effort to the media.

Meanwhile, 3G and 4G cellphone service has been suspended for more than a week, but slower 2G service is still available.

Residents of Srinagar, the region's main city, were busily downloading documents, software and applications onto their smartphones which would likely be able to circumvent the social media block once it goes into effect. Many expressed relief to still have internet access Thursday morning.

"It was a welcome surprise," said Tariq Ahmed, a 24-year-old university student. "It appears they've hit a technical glitch to block social media en mass."

While the government has halted internet service in Kashmir in previous attempts to prevent anti-India demonstrations, this is the first time they have done so in response to the circulation of videos and photos showing alleged military abuse.

Others mocked the government. A Facebook post by Kashmiri writer Arif Ayaz Parrey said the ban showed "the Indian government has decided to take on the collective subversive wisdom of cyberspace humanity."

Indian police and paramilitary officials accuse agitators of using social media to instigate violence.

An international journalists' rights group urged Indian authorities to immediately revoke the "sweeping censorship of social media," saying it "will bring neither peace nor order" in the region.

"Such broad censorship clearly violates the democratic ideals and human rights India purports to uphold," said Steven Butler, Asia Program coordinator at the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Kashmiris have been uploading videos and photos of alleged abuse for some years, but several recently posted clips, captured in the days surrounding a violence-plagued local election on April 9, have proven to be especially powerful and have helped to intensify anti-India protests.

One video shows a stone-throwing teenage boy being shot by a soldier from a few meters (yards) away. Another shows soldiers making a group of young men, held inside an armored vehicle, shout profanities against Pakistan while a soldier kicks and slaps them with a stick.

The video pans to a young boy's bleeding face as he cries. Yet another clip shows three soldiers holding a teenage boy down with their boots and beating him on his back.

The video that drew the most outrage was of young shawl weaver Farooq Ahmed Dar tied to the hood of an army jeep as it patrolled villages on voting day. A soldier can be heard saying in Hindi over a loudspeaker, "Stone throwers will meet a similar fate," as residents look on aghast.

Protests and clashes are an almost daily occurrence in Indian-administered Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment runs deep among the mostly Muslim population after decades of military crackdowns. Disputes over control of the Kashmir region, claimed by both India and Pakistan, have sparked two wars between the nations since 1947.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-telegraph-april-27-2017-india-bans-social-media-in-kashmir-for-one-month

The year social media came of age in India

praskrishna — 2012-12-31T03:33:19Z

Sambhavi Saxena, 19, was at Jantar Mantar on December 25 protesting against Nirbhaya's brutal rape when Delhi Police swooped down, rounded her up along with other agitators and took them to the Parliament Street police station. Sambhavi fired tweet after tweet even as she was bundled into a van.

The article by Javed Anwer and Rukmini Shrinivasan was published in the Times of India on December 31, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

She went on broadcasting to the world all that was happening around her. "Illegally being held here at Parliament St Police Station Delhi w/ 15 other women. Terrified, pls RT," she tweeted. It worked. In a flash, more than 1,700 people retweeted her SOS. Social media analytics firm Favstar later said the message reached over two lakh people.

Police later contested many of Sambhavi's claims. Yet, there was no denying it was her voice that was heard. Her tweets triggered a social media frenzy. The media reacted swiftly. Lawyers volunteered, activists landed up at the police station. Celebrities condemned the action. The police stood no chance.

For the government and keepers of law, it was a PR disaster. They had lost a battle they were accustomed to winning hands down. Now, there was a pesky entity — the public — seeking to change the rules of the game. A teenager armed with a smartphone had used the magic platform called social media to devastating effect, catching the agents of the state flatfooted.

India might have tasted the power of the smartphone first in 2011 when Anna Hazare's stinging anti-corruption message rode the social media wave. But this year saw social media creating a new phenomenon — the rise of the virtually connected Indian youth — which is likely to redraw the terms of engagement between the state and its urban population.

The networking tool that's now a weapon

Finance minister P Chidambaram recently tried to sum up the phenomenon by likening social media-driven snap protests to a flash-mob phenomenon. "Flash mob is a new phenomenon... sometimes they gather to dance and sing. But sometimes they gather to protest... I don't think we are fully prepared to deal with it." Going by the last fortnight, when the government fumbled in dealing with widespread protests over Nirbhaya, the minister's admission was an understatement. Let alone being "fully prepared", they didn't have a clue.

The unbridling of the power of the social media was undoubtedly a top, if not no. 1, trend of 2012 in India. In many cases, it set the agenda of public discourse. As in Palghar, where young Shaheen Dhada's Facebook comment on the shutdown of Mumbai after Bal Thackeray's death kicked off a storm, the virtual world triggered several real-world controversies.

In fits and starts, politicians and the government realized the folly of not joining the fast-unfolding revolution, the exceptions being the Twitter-savvy Shashi Tharoor and Omar Abdullah. The @PMOIndia Twitter handle was born, and today 3.5 lakh people follow it. A host of politicians soon hopped on, realizing the freedom the platform offered for comment on issues, which TV studios didn't.

For Bollywood celebs and cricketers, it became a great way to keep in touch with fans. But the real power of this irreverent and often insolent medium lay with the young aam admi who used social media fearlessly. They voiced their opinion and unsparingly ridiculed leaders with hashtags like #theekhai, making powerful headlines out of what otherwise would have been just whistling in the air.

What's the USP of the social media? On this platform, free speech is unhindered. It's a virtual megaphone with a global reach, as the numbers show. Whether it's Twitter or Facebook, India is a huge presence. Facebook has more than 65 million active users here, putting the country among the top five worldwide in terms of users. Twitter, which has 200 million active users globally, doesn't provide country-specific numbers. But SemioCast, a Paris-based research firm, said in a report in July that India had around 18 million Twitter accounts, placing it sixth among the biggest Twitter nations.

A lot of this social media boom happened in 2012. Research firm SocialBakers estimated in November that the number of Indian Facebook users swelled by 14 million in the past six months. While internet penetration in India is just 11% — three times lower than the global average — around 137million users make the country third biggest in terms of web-connected citizens. Most of these users are urban and young. A Comscore report says 75% of web users here are under-35.

Unlike youngsters in many other countries, Indians are politically active on the web. A Pew Research study this December established that nearly 45% of Indian web users, most of them from urban areas, connect on social media to discuss politics. Only Arab countries scored higher than India on this account. The numbers are backed by GlobalWebIndex, which noted in a September report that India is the third most socially active country with around 78 points.

But this unfettered, unfiltered flow of information and messages showed its ugly side as well. The mischievous rumour-mongering in the wake of the Assam riots was a case in point, as MMSs and incendiary text messages triggered an exodus of people belonging to the northeast from Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad.

Facebook and Twitter started off as friendship and networking tools. But, they have evolved into potent weapons of social mobilization. In a way, India Against Corruption can be credited with starting it in mid-2010. "If you have a worthy cause, social media provides you an unbiased, unfiltered avenue," says Shivendra Chauhan, social media manager for the outfit. "Without it, we wouldn't have got the kind of overwhelming support we received from the youth."

But Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, cautions against being overly technologically deterministic. "Technology doesn't have agency; human beings do. Transferring energy from social media on to the streets isn't something that'll happen every time. It depends on whether the message resonates," he says.

While the anti-corruption movement ran on a sophisticated social media strategy and campaign, the ongoing anti-rape protests have no single organizer or banner, just a message that resonates, says Abraham. On the other hand, when Anonymous India called for boots on the ground at its protests against internet censorship, the turnout was poor, far lower than the number of hashtags on Twitter would have indicated, he adds.

Abraham points out there are close linkages between internet, text messages, social media and mainstream media. "These channels leak into each other and the causal connection becomes unclear," he says. Madhuresh Kumar, national coordinator of the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), an umbrella organization of grassroots movements of the marginalized, agrees. "We use social media, not so much to mobilize people to come to our protests, but to mobilize the mainstream media."

The message determines the power of the medium. If it's something that connects viscerally, like the Nirbhaya protests, its power and reach can be beyond imagination. If it is a more niche message, like an SOS for a dwindling fish species, it will reach a smaller, targeted audience such as environmentalists. But it will reach — unhindered in the palm of your hand.

Look at it any which way, it is here to stay. So, it's time for the state to learn to deal with the new power of the ordinary citizen.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-december-31-2012-javed-anwer-and-rukmini-shrinivasan-the-year-social-media-came-of-age-in-india

LinkedIn will help people in India train for semi-skilled jobs

praskrishna — 2017-02-24T01:51:20Z

Microsoft has launched Project Sangam, a cloud service integrated with LinkedIn that will help train and generate employment for middle and low-skilled workers.

The article by John Ribeiro of IDG News Service was mirrored on CIO blog on February 21, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Microsoft has launched Project Sangam, a cloud service integrated with LinkedIn that will help train and generate employment for middle and low-skilled workers.

The professional network that was acquired by Microsoft in December has been generally associated with educated urban professionals but the company is now planning to extend its reach to semi-skilled people in India.

Having connected white-collared professionals around the world with the right job opportunities and training through LinkedIn Learning, the platform is now developing a new set of products that extends this service to low- and semi-skilled workers, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at an event on digital transformation in Mumbai on Wednesday.

Project Sangam, which is in private preview, is “the first project that is now the coming together of LinkedIn and Microsoft, where we are building this cloud service with deep integration with LinkedIn, so that we can start tackling that enormous challenge in front of us of how to provide every person in India the opportunity to skill themselves for the jobs that are going to be available.”

LinkedIn also plans a placement product for college graduates that will help students finds jobs regardless of whether they studied at top universities or not, Nadella added.

Microsoft announced earlier in the day its Skype Lite, a version of Skype that consumes less data. The company is also offering a ‘lite’ version of LinkedIn, reflecting the need for vendors to factor in low Internet bandwidth, usually running on low-cost and inadequately featured smartphones, when designing products for markets in countries like India.

LinkedIn Lite works on 2G links and is four times faster than the original LinkedIn client, Nadella said.

A large number of low-skilled and semi-skilled workers that Microsoft is targeting with its Sangam project still use feature phones, which will likely be a challenge as Microsoft tries to popularize the service.

Nadella has also backed a controversial Indian government sponsored project to use biometric data collected from over 1 billion people as an authentication mechanism for a variety of services offered by both the government and the private sector.

The project, called India Stack, aims to use a biometric system, called Aadhaar, to facilitate the digital exchange of information. Microsoft said on Tuesday that Skype Lite would support Aadhaar authentication, pointing out to potential uses of the technology such as for verifying the identity of a candidate for a video job interview. Project Sangam too offers authentication using Aadhaar.

Skype Lite is another example of how India Stack is driving the company’s innovation agenda, Nadella said in Mumbai. He announced in Bangalore on Monday that the company's end user products including Windows would be "great participants in the India Stack."

The Aadhaar project has been criticized by privacy activists for collecting biometric information such as the fingerprints and iris scans of people in a central database, which could be misused by both governments and hackers who might get access to the data.The government has been trying to extend the use of Aadhaar, initially designed for the distribution of government benefits and subsidies, to a variety of financial and other services.

"It is indeed shameful that Microsoft is supporting the centralized surveillance project of the Indian government which has dramatically increased the fragility of the Indian information society,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based research organization, the Centre for Internet and Society.

"As Indian citizens we must realize that Microsoft will have our biometrics or our authentication factors that can be used to frame us in crimes or clean out our bank accounts," he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/idg-cio-february-21-2017-john-ribeiro-linkedin-will-help-people-in-india-train-for-semi-skilled-jobs

Kashmir: Telecom firms struggle to block 22 banned social media sites

praskrishna — 2017-05-04T02:29:04Z

A BSNL official says engineers are still working on shutting down the 22 social media sites but so far had been unable to do so without freezing the Internet across Kashmir.

The article by Aijaz Hussain was published in Livemint on May 4, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The government has banned 22 social media sites in an effort to calm tensions in parts of the disputed region of Kashmir, after several viral videos depicting the alleged abuse of Kashmiris by Indian law enforcement fuelled protests. But the sites remained online Thursday morning as the local telecom company struggled to block them.

The government said on Wednesday that the restrictions, to be in effect for one month, were necessary for public safety. “It’s being felt that continued misuse of social networking sites and instant messaging services is likely to be detrimental to the interests of peace and tranquillity in the state,” the public order reads.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director for the Indian advocacy group the Centre for Internet and Society, called the ban a “blow to freedom of speech” and “legally unprecedented in India.”

An official with Kashmir’s state-owned telecom company, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), said engineers were still working on shutting down the 22 sites, including Facebook and Twitter, but so far had been unable to do so without freezing the internet across the Himalayan region. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to give technical details of the effort to the media.

Meanwhile, 3G and 4G cellphone service has been suspended for more than a week, but the slower 2G service was still running.

Residents in Srinagar, the region’s main city, were busily downloading documents, software and applications onto their smartphones, which would likely be able to circumvent the social media block once it goes into effect. Many expressed relief to still have internet access Thursday morning.

“It was a welcome surprise,” said Tariq Ahmed, a 24-year-old university student. “It appears they’ve hit a technical glitch to block social media en mass.”

While the government has halted internet service in Kashmir in previous attempts to prevent anti-India demonstrations, this is the first time they have done so in response to the circulation of videos and photos showing alleged military abuse.

Others mocked the government. One Facebook post by Kashmiri writer Arif Ayaz Parrey said that the ban showed “the Indian government has decided to take on the collective subversive wisdom of cyberspace humanity.”

Kashmiris have been uploading videos and photos of alleged abuse for some years, but several recently posted clips, captured in the days surrounding a violence-plagued local election 9 April, have proven to be especially powerful and have helped to intensify anti-India protests.

One video shows a stone-throwing teenage boy being shot by a soldier from a few metres (yards) away. Another shows soldiers making a group of young men, held inside an armoured vehicle, shout profanities against Pakistan while a soldier kicks and slaps them with a stick. The video pans to a young boy’s bleeding face as he cries. Yet another clip shows three soldiers holding a teenage boy down with their boots and beating him on his back.

The video that drew the most outrage was of young shawl weaver Farooq Ahmed Dar tied to the hood of an army jeep as it patrolled villages on voting day. A soldier can be heard saying in Hindi over a loudspeaker, “Stone throwers will meet a similar fate,” as residents look on aghast.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-may-4-2017-aijaz-hussain-kashmir-telecom-firms-struggle-to-block-22-banned-social-media-sites

A 13-year-old's rape in TN highlights the major threat online sexual grooming poses to children

praskrishna — 2017-05-19T10:16:40Z

Predatory paedophiles online pose a major threat to children who form 7% of internet users in India.

The blog post by Priyanka Thirumurthy was published by News Minute on May 6, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

It was a usual practice, for 13-year-old Meena* from Tirupur to log into her father's Facebook account when she came home from school. While she was scrolling through his timeline one day, she received and accepted a friend request from a profile named Siva Idiot on Facebook. When this 'new friend' sent her a “hi” on chat, the young girl found no reason to ignore this message. Over the next 10 days, they chatted incessantly and she revealed all her personal details - where she lived, studied, who her parents were and even her phone number. Siva Idiot then proceeded to begin calling her on a mobile phone and their conversations lasted hours.

Meanwhile, miffed by her lack of focus on her studies, Meena's parents often chastised her and threatened to take away her laptop and mobile phone. An upset Meena proceeded to complain to Siva Idiot about the 'problems' she faced, who provided emotional support to the teenager. He even offered to come meet her outside her home.

Meena's parents were out in their offices till 8pm every day and Siva Idiot knew this. He met Meena outside her home, when she was still upset about her parents' advice. Her 'friend' then convinced the teenager to leave her house and marry him. Fifteen days after she first spoke to him on Facebook, 13-year-old Meena ran away from home to 'get married' to 22-year-old Ibrahim.

Online sexual grooming

"This is a classic case of sexual grooming," says Vidya Reddy, of Tulir, Centre for Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse. "Abusers study a situation carefully to understand what a child's Achilles heel is and then exploit the situation. Now, with almost every child having accesses to technology and internet in the form of a laptop or phone, these criminals have found new platforms to target children," she adds.

What Vidya explains is called online sexual grooming, a worldwide phenomenon, that has spread along with the speed and easy access to the internet. According to UNICEF, it can be defined as preparing a child or adult for sexual abuse, exploitation or ideological manipulation. A report released by the organisation in 2014 states that the surge in mobile and internet usage in India had brought 400 million people online. Of this, seven percent of internet users in the country are reportedly children.

"Phones are now an extension of our hands and it has completely changed the way crime is committed and presented, " Vidya notes.

Even a report of the Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology in 2014 recognized the threat posed to children by predatory paedophiles online. It emphasises how these predators "conceal their true identity whilst using the internet to ‘groom’ potential victims for sexual purposes."

From home to horror

Meena too was unaware about the identity of the person she was chatting with. In fact, an officer told The News Minute, that it was only when Ibrahim called her on the phone that she even realised she had compromised all her data to an unknown man. But Ibrahim, as the police put it, was too smart for the girl.

"He spoke to her very nicely and formed an emotional connect before she even realised the dangers of the situation," a police officer told The News Minute. "He was just somebody who did odd jobs for a living but his real life was on Facebook. He has close to 5000 friends and they are all young girls," she admits.

On April 27, Ibrahim and Meena made their way to Puducherry, where they took shelter at his friend Prabhakar’s motel. That very night, Meena was allegedly raped. The next morning, Ibrahim's phone somehow came into her possession and when the child surfed through the picture gallery, fresh horror awaited her. It was filled with obscene pictures and videos of young women and children. Shocked, Meena confronted Ibrahim about this and the two got into a loud fight. An angry Ibrahim then abused the teenager who refused to leave with him and abandoned her in the lodge.

When the hotel manager and Ibrahim's friend Prabhakaran came to investigate the source of commotion, he found a devastated Meena alone in the room. In an effort to ‘cheer her up’ he took her out to eat and bought her clothes. As Meena changed in the room, Prabhakaran allegedly waited outside to make his move. He went into the room with a yellow thread in hand, and when she was ready, tied it around her neck and declared that they were married. He then proceeded, according to officials, to sexually assault the girl.

Prabhakaran had even mortgaged all her jewellery, given her some money and pocketed the rest. On April 29, the frightened and devastated teenager managed to escape from the lodge and make a call to her house from a nearby bus stop. By then, her parents had already filed a missing girl complaint with the Tirupur North police and were frantically searching for her.

The need to intervene

According to the UNICEF report, India falls largely short in terms of awareness about online child sexual abuse and exploitation. Parents, it claims, are not aware of the risks the internet poses and therefore do not respond effectively to this form of harassment.

"This case shows that parents and schools have to spend more time educating their wards on online safety. In many schools, non- digital safety lessons are imparted such as good touch and bad touch. But when it comes to the internet, they don't even impart basic lessons," says Pranesh Prakash, Director of the Centre for Internet and Society.

Pranesh argues that while parents cannot monitor children's activity on the internet the whole day, they can ensure they have a trusting relationship with their children. This he claims will create dialogue on the child's activity on the internet or social media and create awareness.

"In this crime, details shared online, led to an offline meeting. So, children must be taught to not share addresses, personal details or meet such 'friends' without their parents' knowledge." he adds.

In India, two major challenges are the lack of a uniform terminology and lacunae in law as far as sexual grooming of children is concerned. Some key legal instruments meant to protect children, predate technological advances. For example, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography does not criminalize online sexual grooming.

Establishing the criminality of sexual grooming or even sexting is difficult in view of the potential for misuse of the law, states the UNICEF report.

Back home and healing

Following her desperate phone call, Tirupur police rescued Meena, and went on to arrest Ibrahim in Pondicherry on April 30. Prabhakaran was arrested on May 2. They have been booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) and other sections of the Indian Penal Code. Police are now investigating if Ibrahim and Prabahakaran have been involved in crimes of this nature in the past as well.

"There is only so much parents can do. They work till eight in the night and children who come back from school at 4pm, have four unsupervised hours to themselves. The only thing they can do is keep a password and stop children from using social media accounts," says the investigating officer, who observes that a number of children chat with strangers, making it difficult to keep track.

Vidya Reddy too expresses shock at sheer number of teenagers who chat with strangers online. The Tulir Director recounts horrific cases, including one where a 16-year-old girl was sexually assaulted and then blackmailed with videos of the abuse. The perpetrator allegedly threatened to leak the images if girl did not bring another child for him to rape.

While sexual grooming and other forms of online sexual abuse are common across the world, in India it takes a unique shape in South Asia. "Our society creates a repressive atmosphere, as far as engagement with the other gender is concerned. So, when the conversation is online, teenagers will risk their safety to push boundaries and the anonymity the internet provides has made this whole set up even more dangerous," concludes Vidya Reddy.

*Name changed

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/newsminute-may-6-2017-a-13-year-olds-rape-in-tn-highlights-the-major-threat-online-sexual-grooming-poses-to-children

Faking it on WhatsApp: How India's favourite messaging app is turning into a rumour mill

praskrishna — 2017-05-19T14:44:05Z

Spreading fast and wild on WhatsApp fake news about riots, ‘miracle’ currency

The article by Samarth Bansal was published in the Hindustan Times on May 19, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

It didn’t take long after demonetisation for almost everyone to hear about the ‘special properties’ of the new Rs 2000 note, which was said to include a ‘built-in GPS-enabled nano-chip’. News of this high-tech feature spread rapidly, even though there was no notification about it from the Reserve Bank of India or any other government department. What there was, instead, was a popular WhatsApp message.

WhatsApp messages were involved in another fake-news controversy the very same month, when word of a salt shortage in North India spread widely. The fake news unleashed panic, and in Hyderabad, among other places, salt prices increased by a factor of four. It even extracted a victim, a woman died in Bakarganj Bazaar, Kanpur, when she slipped and fell into a drain in a panicked buying melee.

This isn’t the only time that fake news that circulated on WhatsApp led to violence. In 2013, messages sent on WhatsApp helped to incite riots in Muzaffarnagar. A two-year old video of a lynching in Pakistan was mischievously promoted as an attack on two Hindu boys by Muslims in Kawal village of Muzaffarnagar. The video, in turn, provoked calls for revenge. Though the police blocked the video on the internet, its spread could not be stopped on the app.

Facebook, WhatsApp’s parent company, has faced much flak for not curbing the circulation of fake news. On its part, Facebook has now said it will try to flag questionable news stories with the help of users and external fact checkers to cope with this problem.

But the instant messaging app poses similar challenges in a particularly intractable form. WhatsApp offers a particularly private medium of communication, something many people like about it. A case currently being heard at the Supreme Court of India concerns the protection of this very quality — while WhatsApp would like to allow Facebook to access its user data, a PIL contends that this move would be a violation of privacy.

The same factors of WhatsApp’s design that protect its users also make it difficult or impossible to study many aspects of communication on the platform. Even as anecdotal evidence piles up that WhatsApp is being used to distribute fake news, then, it remains hard to know just what is happening or what can be done in response.

Facebook vs WhatsApp

The differences between WhatsApp and Facebook dictate the ways people share news on each platform. “Facebook is a social platform where people express their concerns, react, and build perceptions based on an individual’s posts,” says Anoop Mishra, a digital marketing and social media consultant. “However, on WhatsApp, which is an end-to-end messaging platform, people share content in a more personal and closed way.”

It is because the primary mode of sharing on instant messaging apps is one-to-one, as opposed to the one-to-many relationship on Facebook, that the former feels more personal. This personal quality of most of the content shared directly or on small groups via WhatsApp carries with it the implicit endorsement of people you know. Given that the app is now a large and growing part of people’s lives on mobile devices, the way it influences news consumption demands more attention. “Lack of content moderation and privacy controls gives WhatsApp an edge over Facebook for sharing any type of multimedia content,” says Mishra.

For instance, to get your friends’ attention on Facebook, you need to tag them. Not every post by every friend shows up on your news feed; what you see is dictated by an algorithm. WhatsApp has a big advantage here since it works like a text message. You know that your message will be received by everyone you send it to.

A black hole for content

There is no non-anecdotal way to track the spread of content on WhatsApp. Facebook, for instance, is compatible with analytics tools capable of determining that a particular news report has been shared 7,000 times, say, or viewed 20,000 times.

Such analysis is not feasible with WhatsApp, which offers no way to mine social media data to understand the patterns, trends, or reach of any given message. Even its original source is completely opaque. What is true of particular texts also applies to the total sum of activity on WhatsApp: it is impossible to determine what kinds of messages the public is sharing most, what sorts of conditions people are sharing these messages in, or where in the world they are spreading.

Surpassing one billion

WhatsApp arrived in India at the beginning of the decade. At that time, chat apps were generally considered to be interchangeable with text messages. Today they’re widely understood to support sharing of all forms of multimedia content — photos, videos, audio files and even text documents.

Simplicity is one of WhatsApp’s signature virtues. All you need to do is download it: the programme automatically scans your phone book and links up with your contacts who are also users. Crucially, you don’t even need a password. According to Guide to Chat Apps, a report by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the requirement of a password is “a significant barrier to entry for many people in emerging markets when it comes to other apps and social media platforms.”

In February 2016, WhatsApp crossed the one billion mark for active users worldwide. India is its largest market, with about 160 million active users.

WhatsApping the news

WhatsApp’s reach and growing role in the consumption of photos and videos has prompted media companies to take it seriously as a distribution channel. A report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlights the increasing adoption of new social networks among young people and the growing importance of recommendations as a gateway to news. “The digital generation expects the news to come to them,” says the report’s author journalist Nic Newman in a press release. “Young people rarely go directly to a mainstream news website anymore.”

But unlike apps like WeChat and Snapchat, which are gaining currency among millennials, WhatsApp hasn’t positioned itself as a media distribution platform. Media organisations have been experimenting nonetheless. For instance, the BBC ran pilots on WhatsApp and WeChat for the Indian elections in 2014. Users subscribed to the BBC news service on WhatsApp by adding a number to their contacts and sending a request message to join. They were then put on a broadcast list that sent them up to three updates a day in Hindi and English. Many media outlets, including ours, now have a WhatsApp sharing icon on their mobile websites.

For all its susceptibility to the dissemination of fake news, WhatsApp presents unique challenges to the mass sharing of content, just as it does for the mass tracking of it. It has no official application program interface (API), the service which allows programmers to build applications that automate the functions of a platform. “An official WhatsApp API release could spawn an entirely new industry of startups, in much the same way that the release of Twitter’s API did,” says the Tow Center report. “Except this time, it could be even bigger, given WhatsApp’s near-billion account user base.” Reaching out to a wider audience on WhatsApp — with either fake or authentic news — needs to be performed manually, via broadcast lists, which allow you to send the same message to many people at once, and groups.

State of control

Fake news might lead only to harmless speculation or minor inconvenience, as it did with rumours about the Rs 2000 note, or it could be dangerous, as was the case during the Muzaffarnagar riots. Pranesh Prakash, a policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a research and advocacy group focused on digital technology, believes that social media rumours gain potency after the imposition of censorship, under which people begin to wonder what the government is trying to conceal. “There is no way rumours can be completely quelled,” he says, “but the state can act against rumours through clear communication that calls out particular rumours, and tells people not to believe them.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-samarth-bansal-faking-it-on-whatsapp-how-india-s-favourite-messaging-app-turned-into-a-rumour-mill

Suicide videos: Facebook beefs up team to monitor content

praskrishna — 2017-05-20T02:59:14Z

Responding to the spate of suicides being livestreamed, social media giant Facebook has announced it will add another 3,000 people to its 4,500-strong review team that moderates content. The review team will also work in tandem with law enforcement agencies on this issue.

The article by Kim Arora was published in the Times of India on May 5, 2017.

"Over the last few weeks, we've seen people hurting themselves and others on Facebook, either live or in video posted later. It's heartbreaking, and I've been reflecting on how we can do better for our community," Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a status update and added, "Over the next year, we'll be adding 3,000 people to our community operations team around the world, on top of the 4,500 we have today, to review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly."

"...we'll keep working with local community groups and law enforcement who are in the best position to help someone if they need it, either because they're about to harm themselves, or because they're in danger from someone else," Zuckerberg added announcing the move.

Over the last year, several violent incidents and suicides have been streamed live on Facebook. In India last April, a young student went live on Facebook minutes before he jumped off the 19th floor of Taj Lands End hotel in Mumbai. The same month saw similar news coming out of the US and Thailand as well. A 49-year-old from Alabama went live on Facebook before shooting himself in the head. Another man from Bangkok made a video of hanging his 11-month-old daughter, and uploaded it to Facebook. He was later discovered to have killed himself too.

"It's a positive development that Facebook is adding human power and tools for dealing with hate speech, child abuse and suicide attempts. It would be interesting to see how Facebook coordinates with the Indian police departments to get an emergency response to a potential suicide attempt or attempt to harm someone else," says Rohini Lakshane, program officer, Center for Internet and Society, though she warns against false reports clogging up reviewers' feeds and police notifications.

On Facebook, a video, picture or any other piece of content reaches the review team after it is reported by users for flouting its "community guidelines".

Chinmayi Arun, research director at the Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi, says Facebook must be transparent about this process. "Facebook should also announce how it is keeping this process accountable. It is a public platform of great importance which has been guilty of over-censorship in the past. It should be responsive not just to government censorship requests but also to user requests to review and reconsider its blocking of legitimate content," she says.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-kim-arora-may-5-2017-suicide-videos-facebook-beefs-up-team-to-monitor-content

Now, Twitter too caught up in Cambridge Analytica controversy

Admin — 2018-05-02T02:49:25Z

Twitter does not share a break-up of users by region, the platform has less than 100 million users in India.

The article by Prasun Sonwalkar and Vidhi Choudhury was published in the Hindustan Times on April 30, 2018. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Social media company Twitter Inc sold data to the University of Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan who harvested millions of Facebook users’ information without their knowledge, it has emerged, although the company has clarified that no private data was accessed.

It isn’t clear whether any of the data pertained to Indian users.

Twitter does not share a break-up of users by region, the platform has less than 100 million users in India.

Kogan, who created tools that allowed political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to psychologically profile and target voters, bought the data from the microblogging website in 2015, well before the recent scandal, involving use of the data of Facebook users, came to light.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Kogan bought data on tweets, user names, photos, profiles and locations over a five-month period between December 2014 and April 2015 through his company Global Science Research (GSR). Twitter said it had banned GSR and Cambridge Analytica from buying data or running advertisements on the website and that no private data had been accessed, while Kogan insisted the data had only been used to create "brand reports" and "survey extender tools" and that he had not violated Twitter's policies.

The daily reported that Twitter charges companies and organisations for large data sets that are particularly useful for gleaning public opinion or receptiveness to certain topics and ideas, although Twitter bans companies from using the data to derive sensitive political information or matching it with personal information obtained elsewhere.

A Twitter spokesman confirmed the ban and said: "Twitter has also made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned and operated by Cambridge Analytica. This decision is based on our determination that Cambridge Analytica operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices. "Cambridge Analytica may remain an organic user on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules."

The company said it does not allow "inferring or deriving sensitive information like race or political affiliation, or attempts to match a user's Twitter information with other personal identifiers" and that it had staff in place to police this "rigorously".

Sunil Abraham, founder for think tank Centre for Internet and Society said: “Even though Twitter claims it has contracts in place and staff for contractual enforcement, I cannot understand how they will prevent those buying their data from inferring race and political affiliation. Especially in jurisdictions like ours without comprehensive data protection law.”

A Cambridge Analytica spokesman said the company used Twitter for political advertising but insisted that it had never "undertaken a project with GSR focusing on Twitter data and Cambridge Analytica has never received Twitter data from GSR”.

Delhi-based lawyer Apar Gupta said, “Since we do not have a data protection law at present we are more or less dependent on the proactive disclosures by Twitter. Facebook is not a gold standard of upholding user rights and it is hoped that we soon have a regulator that can enforce such disclosures and place penalties.”

On 5 April, Facebook said user data of more than 560,000 Indians may have been harvested by British researcher Cambridge Analytica, at the centre of a recent storm over data breaches and potential privacy violations on the social media network.

“Twitter or Facebook are not alone in harvesting and storing user data. This is a widespread industry practice that relies on profiling. Such breaches and malpractices will continue to occur till we have a set of defined norms and enforceable penalties to protect user rights,” Gupta further added.

Only 335 users in India installed the thisisyourdigitallife app developed by academic Kogan and his company Global Science Research that may have been possibly at the centre of the data breaches, according to Facebook. The 335 people make up just 0.1% of the app’s total worldwide installs. Users agreed to take a personality test and have their data collected by the app, which then went on to also access information about the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a much larger data pool.

Twitter Inc’s spokesperson said in an e-mail that an internal review conducted by it showed GSR had not accessed any private data.

“Unlike many other services, Twitter is public by its nature. People come to Twitter to speak publicly, and public Tweets are viewable and searchable by anyone. In 2015, Global Science Research (GSR) did have one-time API access to a random sample of public Tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” the company statement added.

This is basically information that users chose to make public.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-april-30-2018-prasun-sonwalkar-vidhi-choudhury-now-twitter-too-caught-up-in-cambridge-analytica-controversy

Allow admins to add users to online group chats only after permission: SFLC.in

Admin — 2018-06-26T02:03:19Z

SFLC.in -- a donor supported legal services organisation -- has written an open letter to messaging service providers like WhatsApp, Facebook and others, urging them to modify their platforms to ensure that users are not added to group chats without their permission.

The article was published in the Times of India on June 1, 2018.

In its letter, Software Freedom Law Centre, India (SFLC.in) said any user with administrator rights can currently add another person to the group without the latter's permission.

In the absence of a mechanism to prevent themselves from being added to groups that they would not like to participate in, users have no option but to manually exit the groups.

"This is a troubling state of affairs because users may be forcefully exposed to a range of subjectively undesirable content that they would never have signed up for otherwise, which can be particularly damaging, especially in situations where malicious actors attempt to intimidate, disparage, harass or harm individuals in any way," the letter said.

The letter has also been co-signed by Digital Empowerment Foundation, Centre for Internet and Society and a few others.

Emails sent to Facebook, Tencent and others seeking their comments did not elicit any response.

SFLC.in argued that the current format is an issue for many, including those belonging to minority and vulnerable groups.

"While blocking malicious actors can usually help mitigate the damage to an extent, on online messaging services like yours, they are able to easily circumvent blocks by creating groups and adding their targets to these groups," it said.

The problem is only made worse when personal information like phone numbers, user IDs and photographs are shared with a large number of users, which could open the doors to even greater abuse, it added.

SFLC.in argued that there are no adequate safeguards to prevent infringement of user rights and therefore, these platforms should take immediate steps to address this issue.

"...implement measures to make it so that being added to group conversations without permission is no longer a possibility. Not only will this greatly help in limiting abusive uses of your services, but it will also make users less wary of using the services, making the Internet a safer space for us all," it added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-june-1-2018-allow-admins-to-add-users-to-online-group-chats-only-after-permission-sflc-in

Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi

Sarah McKeever — 2015-07-16T08:22:13Z

This post by Sarah McKeever is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Sarah is a PhD candidate at the India Institute, King’s College London, and her work focuses on the impact of social media on contemporary political movements. In this essay, she explores the increasingly hierarchical system of activism on the Internet, based on Western corporate desire for data, and how it is shaping who is seen and heard on the Internet in India.

Background

I will preface this post by stating that as an American, my personal experience of the Internet has been shaped by nearly 18 years as an active user. My experience with digital interfaces, websites, and social media has been formed through my experiences during the Internet revolution in the United States. Academic and personal training have shaped what I determine to be trustworthy, useful, and credible when searching for information. This post is based on field research I am conducting in New Delhi from January through June 2015.

With these preconceptions and standards in mind, I began to research organisations that I felt were credible enough to approach for interviews in January 2015. My current research project investigates the impact that social media has had on the issues of corruption and violence against women in New Delhi, following the social movements on these issues in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 respectively. I started at an organisational level in order to research the impact that social media and the movements themselves had on organisations working on these issues. Areas of interest include any changes in issue engagement and discourse around gender violence and corruption. I focused exclusively on organisations that have an office in New Delhi and engage in activism in an urban context. Many of these organisations also have a presence in other states and include rural as well as urban projects. I conducted semi-structured interviews in order to engage with the changes wrought by the digital on a qualitative rather than quantitative basis.

Activism and Digital Hierarchy: A Divided Internet?

While conducting initial research, I began to investigate two separate but related areas of inquiry. The first was relatively straightforward: what type of differences were there between groups which actively engaging with the affordances of the Internet and Web 2.0? In my research I examined online awareness groups and campaigns as well as more traditional advocacy and awareness groups that were struggling to translate their work onto the Internet and on social media.

While engaging with the first question, I quickly discovered that the divide between how organisations leveraged the affordances of the Internet - and social media in particular - was stark. Earl and Kimport (2011) write that organisations that directly translate previous advocacy on the ground onto the Internet fail to fully leverage the affordances of the Internet. Organisations that effectively utilise the strengths of the Internet - including flash tactics, crowd-sourcing, and networked leadership - have in fact transformed the world of activism. They have created a new type of “digital activism” through the use of an increasingly digital networked society (Castells 2010, Rainie and Wellman 2012). While this is a simplification of the overall argument – and I personally would argue that in actuality organisations work on a range of digital capabilities and the idea of a spectrum rather than a binary division would be more appropriate at this point – it was clear that both sides were struggling to reach some sort of equilibrium between each other’s capabilities when I conducted interviews with them.

The second inquiry stemmed from my engagement with the first: how was the “active” use of the Internet and social media by an organization translating into an interpretation of their effectiveness? In other words, was an “active” social media presence and a slick website contributing to an impression that they were somehow more impactful than the organisations which lacked these features and is this phenomenon creating a new hierarchy of activism in Delhi?

Many of the organisations that I spoke with who used the Internet and social media “well,” attracted foreign attention and funding. It is clear there is a monetary incentive for organisations to be present and easily accessible via search engines and social media platforms. And while social media has become a huge selling point in India - including in last year’s Parliamentary elections - much of the funding and attention appears to come from outside of India in these particular cases. While social media has become a popular tool for outreach in New Delhi, the emphasis placed on it is possibly being driven by forces outside of India in the activist sphere.

Organisations that had been involved in advocacy and grassroots activism before the Internet boom in India discussed the struggle to make effective use of the affordances of the Internet. My participants unilaterally expressed a desire to engage with the digital audience in India – an audience of approximately 310 million users according to Internet Live Stats (2015) – but were often ill equipped to do so. Stated difficulties included a lack of a dedicated communications and media strategist, lack of experience with social media and web design, and difficulty translating nuanced discussion onto social media sites which are not necessarily designed to facilitate complex and controversial discussions. Some participants directly stated that an online presence, whether it was effective or not, had become essential to obtaining foreign funding and attention, as a digital presence represents a tangible deliverable when applying for foreign grants.

It is clear from any cursory examination of social media sites that the mediums demand an increasing amount of content from its users. Simply put, the more you post, the more you are seen and heard above the increasing noise and chaos of social media. And if being seen and heard represents success, the message itself can get lost in translation. Click bait, sponsored posts, and buzzy headlines attract far more attention and gain more traction than any post attempting to create nuance and demand deeper engagement, at least in the cases I have personally observed and in my experience with activist groups.

The growing popularity of social awareness campaigns and organisations designed for the online world were quite obviously far more successful in utilising social media and web pages to draw attention to a specific issue. These campaigns especially were extremely popular with Delhi youth in particular and effectively used visual displays - such as crowd-sourced images and provocative posters - to highlight issues of gender violence and corruption. Occasionally some participants were outwardly dismissive of older advocacy groups, which they felt were out of step with the times and content to stay in their comfort zones.

In spite of the success of many online campaigns on the issues I researched, few were able to translate the momentum generated by the campaign into a broader discussion and deeper engagement on their chosen issue. While some participants stated this was not necessarily what they desired to do - some chose to remain purely as an awareness campaign without moving into advocacy - other participants stated a desire to do more and engage with the complex cultural, societal, and political constructs surrounding gender and corruption in India. When they attempted to engage in this more nuanced conversation, they often lost momentum on social media and occasionally stopped their campaign efforts altogether.

The rift was clear, and the struggle to merge worlds and effectively translate a variety of skill sets into effective advocacy was fairly well delineated. What troubled me was the implicit assumption that was being made around “effective” and “good” use of the Internet and social media. Why did a glossy website and an “active” social media presence appear to translate into organisational effectiveness? What was driving that assumption? It was an assumption I occasionally found myself making when researching organisations and even in some of my earliest interviews. Why did daily Facebook posts, likes, multiple Tweets, and followers translate into an interpretation of success and impact?

As Western, and in the case of Facebook and Twitter, American publically traded companies, there is a clear business prerogative in encouraging ever-increasing usage of their sites. More posts and tweet equals more data, which can then be analyzed or sold to a variety of different entities that want to utilise this data to create wealth. Facebook and Twitter also happen to be sites that can be used to generate conversation around key issues and act as an easy way to aggregate thousands, if not millions, of users behind a cause. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Delhi Rape case mobilisations are only some of the hundreds of cases where social media sites have played a key role in mobilizing political, social, and cultural change.

However there is a corporate prerogative at work that is often ignored in these narratives. It is in a social media companies’ best interest to encourage frequent usage, as this is how free services generate revenue. Those who post the most win the race to be seen and heard. Those who do not - or do not have the funds to pay for sponsored posts or tweets - get lost in the shuffle, viewed as out of step and struggling to adapt to modern urban India, regardless of the quality work they may be doing offline. The “good” user is the most active user, regardless of what the content actually is. It can easily be termed as a binary between quantity versus quality, but this diminishes the extremely effective and thoughtful work of some digital media campaigns, which demands a different type of quality to actually become an impactful movement. It is therefore a more complex phenomenon than blindly generating massive amounts of content, but this is certainly a critical piece to digital success.

My conclusion, and one which was discussed and inspired by an early participant, was that it was the social media platforms – including key sites like Facebook, Twitter, and to a lesser extent YouTube - were partially generating and multiplying the aura of effectiveness around organisations and groups which had heavily emphasized social media as a core part of their outreach strategy. This is not to deny the very real success that several of these campaigns have had in generating conversation and change around critical issues in India. It instead questions why our notion of success and effectiveness has been altered so quickly, especially in an urban and digital context.

Based on my fieldwork, I encountered a digital hierarchy in three different aspects in activist groups. These divisions emerge at the level of search engines and ranking, web page aesthetics, and finally social media usage and statistical data. I will briefly examine these levels in the following sections.

Level I: Search Engines and Page Rankings

The first was generated at the level of the search engine. Higher ranked and frequently visited websites appear higher on any search engine page, based on the search algorithm. In the first searches I conducted, several organisations with well-developed and easily navigable websites always appeared high on the search page, and were the first organisations I made contact with. As I began to dig deeper into partner organisations and get recommendations from my participants, I discovered new organisations that had never appeared in any search I had conducted, in spite of their clear links to the issues I was researching. These organisations have less of an audience and less of a digital voice from the very beginning. This is not even engaging with the issue of language on the Internet, as all of my searches were in English and not in Hindi or any other language spoken in India and were focussed initially only on organisations with an office in Delhi.

A second issue at the level of the search engine was that the organisations that appeared highest on the list had links to larger partner organisations in Europe and the United States, and occasionally had head offices in New York or London. The larger global presence may have had an impact on page ranking, as they were more likely to be searched for and recognised globally. The dominance of English on the Internet may also play a role, limiting the potential set of results, though again I made this decision consciously. Language choice has had a demonstrable impact on what a person sees on the Internet and what appears using the same search term. The burden of visibility influencing potential digital impact is clear, and practically forces some organisations to invest in a digital presence without a clear digital strategy. This can prove extremely detrimental – especially if the web page proves difficult to navigate and use, which I discuss in the following section - and move investment away from advocacy and programmes on the ground. Visibility is also a key concern for groups that exist purely as a digital campaign, as their potential success is based almost solely on how easy they are to find. Failure leads to diminished searches and lower rankings outside of the first results page from a search engine, which few people click beyond, thus dramatically limiting the impact an organisational webpage can have from the very beginning.

Level II: Webpage Aesthetics

The second area consisted of the content and ease of use of the website. As a researcher, I was compelled to look into every recommended organisation that engaged with the issues I was researching. That being said the organisations with more developed websites caught my attention and implicitly created the impression that it was a more desirable contact. This is quite obviously not the case in reality, and often the organisations that had less advanced websites and appeared technologically less capable proved to be highly credible sources doing commendable work. However the difficulty of navigating some of the websites, which included issues such as broken hyperlinks, difficult interfaces, and offered very little information on the activities of the organisations would prove deeply unappealing to an observer with less motivation than myself. Going against my own training and experience and trusting the power of the network of recommendations on the ground proved to be just as useful as fairly random web searches. In terms of first impressions, it is difficult to move beyond these issues of navigation for an outside observer which expects a quality organisation to have a quality website.

Again, organisations with head offices based in the United States or Europe often were easily navigable and had high quality webpage design, representing a clear trend and highlighting the emphasis placed on the digital aboard. It was also very clearly which organisations had started on the Internet, based purely on design and functionality, though there was a certain bias as the Internet campaigners I spoke too had all had had great success as an online campaign. Finding failed campaigns would have added a key counterpoint to my work, but the difficulty of doing so proved insurmountable for this particular project. Design and navigability are key indicators of skill and investment in digital presence from an outsider’s perspective. It is less than representative of the story on the ground and the success of an organisation, especially if it is not a purely digital entity.

Level III: Social Media Use and Statistics

The third and final level I encountered was determined by social media use. For every organization or participant I met I did cursory research on the various social media platforms they used, how many likes or followers they had near the day of my interview, and roughly how often the organization posted and tweeted. About 90% of my participant organisations had a least a Facebook page and a Twitter account. The number of followers varied widely, from about 200 to nearly 200,000 on Facebook and Twitter. Daily posts and variety of content was a key component to the success of the more widely followed groups online. It was immediately clear that groups that posted sporadically and without immediately stimulating content did not generate or gain nearly as much digital attention.

Many organisations discussed the struggle to move beyond a closed and familiar network, to reach out to the audience they know is there. But without a clear strategy, and even more importantly without a dedicated communications position, their digital engagement often mirrored their offline audience; a closed network of individuals already dedicated to change in the area the organisation was working in. They often failed to meet the incessant demands of the medium for easy content and had difficulties expanding their reach or message beyond their previously established networks of influence.

Those organisations which were able to attract digital attention on social media, while feeling it was an important tool for outreach – especially for youth in Delhi – and places where conversations on key issues could take place, also discussed the importance of social media statistics as a measurable deliverable. Donors, especially foreign funders, placed an emphasis on growth on social media sites as an indicator of success and growing influence. Whether social media growth can actually be an indicator of influence is still up for debate, but it is indicative of the notion that success means quantity, rather than quality, similar to the Western corporate prerogative of growth. That this is the new measure and standard of success for an activist organization is a troubling trend, and one unlikely to change in the near future.

Conclusion

I have argued that corporate strategies and imperatives are creating this new class system of activism in India. I labelled it a “Western” corporate strategy, based on the American origins of the main players Facebook and Twitter, which are the predominate mediums my participants engaged with and have some of the largest audiences in India. Facebook had 108 million users of May 2014 Twitter has around 19 million users (Statista 2015) in India, though these are estimates and in all likelihood there has been an increase in users. The new hierarchy masks the reality that impact and results cannot be measured by likes and retweets. While there is indeed power in these particular sites, the difficulty in documenting what influence actually translates into in the offline world is a well-documented debate. I do not doubt that the Internet and social media, in urban and increasingly in rural India, have great affordances. But these advances do not have to come at the expense of equally important organisations whose ability to translate these messages digitally is more limited than others, especially when this hierarchy is partially generated by corporate sensibilities whose sole aim is profit generation.

While this hierarchy has been explored as an issue of second-level digital divide- where the issue is not lack of access but lack of training and knowledge of the digital world – I do not believe this is the only issue at stake. The increasing power of large companies to determine the way we interact and the rules of effective communication and transmission are deeply troubling, and leaves little room for alternatives. Collaboration can be an effective way of mitigating some of the differences, but this option is not always available to every group.

While these are questions that require further examination, it is clear that there is a divide between organisation’s digital strategies and whether they are able to leverage the affordances of the Internet and social media applications. I have argued that the operational aspects of social media sites increase this divide in particular, as they demand increasing amounts of data to generate profit. A strong digital presence is increasingly linked to an idea of effectiveness and impact, without investigating offline realities. This in turn can lead to a new hierarchy of activism, which limits the voices of some and magnifies the digital voices of others who are clearly better at manipulating the advantages of the Internet. I do not wish to say that offline activism is more effective than online activism and that we should not engage with digital mediums to promote. I only seek to question how this increasingly digital reality is creating a hierarchal system that is not reflective of offline reality, question what knowledge might be left behind in the process, and critically examine the underlying structures and platforms underlying the growing field of digital activism in India.

References

Castells, M. (2010) Networks of Outrage and Networks of Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press

Earl, J. and Kimport, K. (2011) Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Internet Live Stats (2015) www.internetlivestats.com Accessed 23 May 2015

Rainie, L. and Wellman, B. (2012) Networked: The New Social Operating System, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Statista (2015) www.statista.com Accessed 25 May 2015

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_effective-activism

TIkTok: It’s time for Biden to make a decision on his digital policy with China

aman — 2021-01-22T06:11:43Z

As the United State's new president comes into office he is faced with creating a cohesive digital relations policy that corrects some of the damage done by his predecessor. This article is the first part of a series analysing his policies and challenges.

While on the campaign trail, now US president elect Joe Biden, made it clear to voters that he viewed Tik Tok as “a matter of genuine concern.” The statement came amidst a growing environment of hostility within the American government against the application. At the helm of the hostility was (now former) president Donald Trump’s passing of an executive order banning Tik Tok in the country and his attempts at forcing its parent company ByteDance to restructure the app under American ownership. Now, as the presidency passes hands, it is worth examining how the government got here and just how concerned the Biden administration should be with Tik Tok and how their strategy with the app could set the tone for digital relations with China going forward

The Road so far: The ban and forced sale of TikTok

America’s motivation to ban and sell the application can be explained by two contrasting factors: the cybersecurity risks that TikTok poses, and the country’s currently ongoing trade war with China. On the security side TikTok has faced immense scrutiny from governments around the world as to the amount of data that the application collects from its users as well as the potential links between Bytedance and the Chinese government. Furthermore there is a belief that due to the Chinese legislation that compels companies to assist the state on matters of national intelligence, there is little TikTok could do should the Chinese state decide to use it as an instrument of data collection. On the side of trade, the TikTok ban represents one of the more landmark blows dealt by the Trump government in its trade war with China. The US, since the start of his presidency has levied exclusive tariffs on specific Chinese commodities totalling to more than $550 billion. China has in response levied its own tariffs on certain American goods, with a total value of those estimated at $185 billion. Beyond these tariffs, the move to ban TikTok extends the trade war by creating clear hurdles for Chinese corporations to exist within the US market and firmly extended Trump’s protectionist trade policies into the digital sphere.

As such, on 6th August 2020, Trump released an executive order banning TikTok (as well as Chinese messaging and social media app Wechat). The ban has, however, since been indefinitely suspended as part of ongoing litigation on the matter at the federal level.

Shortly after the ban, came the attempts at forcing through the sale. While the deal has generally been referred to as ‘the TikTok sale’, it is not actually an outright purchase of the social media platform by an American company (Microsoft attempted such a purchase but was rejected by Byte Dance). Rather, the deal would see the establishment of a new US based subsidiary called TikTok global that would be partly owned (20%) by Oracle and Walmart, with Oracle becoming a trusted technology provider in order to ensure that US user’s data remains within the state. The agreement stipulates that the board of this new entity would have 4 out of 5 of the seats populated by US citizens, and that the company would go public as well. The current agreement would still see Bytedance retain ownership of the algorithms used by TikTok, which is in line with restrictions from the Chinese government preventing the sale of the algorithm to a foriegn owner without a state granted license.

How should the Biden administration handle this situation?

Dealing with the TikTok question must be one of the Biden administration’s top most priorities. The most obvious question they face is whether or not to reverse the ban and to continue to push through the sale between Bytedance and Oracle.

The case for enforcing the ban until the sale to American owners seems one that is straightforward enough. The cybersecurity concerns surrounding Bytedance’s proximity to the Chinese state and the influence of Chinese legislation are reasonable concerns. And any data gained from the application in the hands of a hostile state could be potentially harmful. This threat could be potentially reduced based on the role played by Oracle as a trusted technology partner. However with details of what exactly constitutes the functions of a ‘trusted technology partner’ it is impossible to say this with any great certainty. Simultaneously, there is a slight sense of irony in a Chinese based digital company protesting against another country’s protectionist stance to the internet.

Nonetheless these benefits are in many ways greatly over exaggerated, and in many ways allowing TikTok to return without requiring a sale could prove more beneficial in the long term. Not only would the app’s return be welcomed by its immense audience (estimated 100 million US users), it would also be a clear demonstration of America’s commitment to a less fragmented internet and more open digital economy. Furthermore, revoking the ban would also allow for the opportunity to reassess and reformulate the US’s economic and political strategy with regards to Chinese technology.

On the economic side, a retraction of the ban could signal the beginning of the end of the US-China trade war. Chinese investors are sure to see the shift from a radical republican president to a centrist democrat one as the perfect opportunity to increase foreign investment, which had been steadily declining recently. Such investment could prove significantly more substantial to the United States in a post covid-19 world as opposed to even in 2019. It is not unimaginable that Biden would look to maximise this opportunity to boost the economy.

On the political side, the government has to evaluate the success of sanctions levied against Chinese technology and whether that approach of blanket banning will translate effectively to the digital sphere. Not only has the US’s sanctions against certain chinese technologies proved unsuccessful, tools such as VPNs that can negate a ban make this strategy even less effective in the digital space.

The largest hurdle to revoking the ban would be the genuine cybersecurity concerns with a Chinese corporation having access American citizens’ data. However, dealing with these concerns through a simple ban of the application would only solve this one instance of excessive surveillance and data collection by a foreign app. Rather any solution must look to fix the issue at its root - that being the need for a more cohesive, detailed and overarching national data protection and cybersecurity policy. Such a policy could place clear limitations on data collection, stipulate data localisation policies for sensitive information and outline numerous other means of reducing the threat involved with allowing applications from states such as China to operate in the US.

Ultimately, Biden will be confronted with the reality of this situation the moment he enters office. The decision he makes on TikTok would set the tone for his term and for his government’s relationship with China. Whatever he decides to do, he needs to do it as soon as possible. The clock is ticking.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/tiktok-it2019s-time-for-biden-to-make-a-decision-on-his-digital-policy-with-china

J&K social media ban: Use of 132-year-old Act can’t stand judicial scrutiny, say experts

praskrishna — 2017-05-04T02:12:23Z

Jammu and Kashmir's social media ban: Legal experts are not convinced this is a viable order

The article by Shruti Dhapola was published in the Indian Express on April 28, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

For residents of Jammu and Kashmir, there’s a blanket ban on social media for the next one month. This means no access to Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, Skype WeChat, YouTube, Telegram and other social networks.

As The Indian Express reported, this ‘social media ban’ was ordered by the state government after Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti chaired a meeting of the Unified Command Headquarters in Srinagar. The total list includes 22 social media websites, and the order, a copy of which is available with The Indian Express, says this is being done “in the interest of maintenance of public order.”

The order to block the sites was issued by RK Goyal, Principal Secretary in the Home department, and cites Section 5 of Indian Telegraph Act, which “confers powers upon the Central government or the state government to take possession of license telegraphs and order stoppage of transmission or interception or detention of messages”.

The order reasons that social media sites are “being used by anti-national and anti-social elements by transmitting inflammatory messages in various forms”. It directs all ISPs to block these websites in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

But questions are already being raised over its legality.

“This is an illegal order because the Telegraph Act and Rules, which the order cites, doesn’t give the government the power to block websites. The Telegraph Act is a colonial-era legislation first passed in 1885 in the aftermath of the Mutiny, making telegraphs a monopoly of the colonial British government, and restricting Indians’ access to communications technologies. In 1996, in the PUCL case, the Supreme Court laid down that powers to intercept or block transmission of messages cannot be exercised without procedural safeguards in place. In 2007, procedural safeguards were made for interception, but not for blocking of telegraphic communications,” points out Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at Centre for Internet and Society.

Pavan Duggal, senior lawyer specialising in cyberlaw, concurs. “Legally, the order is not viable. This is because the IT Act applies for blocking, under Section 69 (A). Also Section 81 of the IT Act also make it clear that this is a special law, which will prevail over any other older law. The IT ACT deals with everything related to the internet.”

The IT ACT notes in Section 1, that “It shall extend to the whole of India and, save as otherwise provided in this Act, it applies also to any offence or contravention there under committed outside India by any person.”

But even blocking under the IT Act isn’t something that can be ordered over night, and the powers for this rest with the central government.

“There’s a provision (69A) in the Information Technology Act which provides for blocking of specific web pages for national security reasons, but only by the Central government. The J&K government, thus can only request the Central government to block. The central government has in the past denied requests by state governments as they were unlawful requests,” Prakash said.

However, blocking of URLs or in fact complete internet shutdowns is not new in India. “This is an example of Internet manipulation by the governments world over. The first casualty of any disturbance is now the Internet and the government, even the democratic ones living under rule of law have decided that is a-okay to prevent people from communicating in the name of law and order,” said Mishi Choudhary, President and Legal Director at SFLC.in

SFLC.in has also been keeping a track of internet shutdowns in India. It has a dedicated website Internetshutdowns.in which crowd-sources information on these bans, and India has already seen seven shut internet shutdowns in first three months of 2017. For instance, in the state of Nagaland internet and mobile services were down for nearly a month from January 30 to February 20.

The issue of url blocking and internet shutdowns inevitably gets linked to one of freedom of speech. While reasonable restrictions can be imposed under Article 19 (2) of the Constitution, experts are not convinced the current order makes enough of a case to justify such a blanket ban.

“The citizens of J&K are Indian citizens and can challenge the order as violative of Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution, violative of right to free speech and expression,” says Choudhary.

“Any kind of blocking must conform to the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression, and any blocking must be legally “reasonable” for it to be acceptable as a legitimate restriction under Art.19(2). This blanket ban of 22 arbitrarily chosen service — why block QQ or WeChat, but not LinkedIn — and that too for a month, cannot be called reasonable under any circumstances,” argues Prakash.

Prakash adds that the order also raises other international concerns for India. “It also violates India’s international legal obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), whose Article 19 protects the freedom of thought, opinion and expression. Only those restrictions that are provided by law, have a legitimate aim, are necessary with less restrictive option being available, and are proportionate to the harm being address are allowed. For instance, targeting of hate speech that is calling for genocide is reasonable. But such blanket bans of communications platforms are not,” he argues.

So can the citizens challenge such an order, which puts a blanket ban on social networks? The answer is yes, as in this case this order “is legally untenable,” explains Duggal.

On the practice of blocking, he points that in today’s world it can only be seen an antiquated practice. “To give an analogy it is like fixing a leaking roof with a band-aid. It will only increase traffic to the blocked websites, and there are indirect ways to reach these sites via proxies and other tools as well,” he adds.

The orders can always be reviewed by the courts. “While the IT Act allows for blocking, it should be remembered the process is always open to judicial review. Courts have final authority, and they can examine whether the principles of law were applied when passing such a blocking order,” explains Duggal.

The affected social media websites or ISPs don’t yet have a response to this order. When we reached out, Facebook said it did not have an official comment on the ban. Mobile internet service providers Vodafone and Airtel also refused to comment.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/indian-express-april-28-2017-shruti-dhapola-j-k-social-media-ban