But the legal challenger added that it was not against him. “This is bigger than any profession. It affects everyone.
He pointed to a wide gap between the official report on the impact of Covid on the country and the assessment by international agencies. “The World Health Organization has said that the number of Covid deaths in India is almost 10 times higher than the official count. Anyone who suggests that can be branded a fake news peddler, and should be taken down.
In April 2021, India’s most populous Uttar Pradesh was ravaged by a second wave of Covid-19 and severe oxygen shortages in hospitals. The state government denied that there was any problem. Amidst this unfolding crisis, a man tweeted an SOS call to save his dying grandfather. State officials accused him of spreading rumors and terror.
Experts believe reforms to India’s IT laws will allow the government to extend its powers over the internet, force social media platforms to remove critical voices and use emergency powers to censor a BBC documentary against Modi. .
Prateek Wagre, director of policy at the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital freedom organization, said that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) social media arm itself is spreading misinformation about political opponents and critics while “reporters are running into the ground”. And he faced the consequences of bringing out an inconvenient truth,” he said.
Wagre said the lack of clarity about what constitutes fake news only exacerbates the issue. “Looking at the same data set, two people can come to different conclusions,” he added. “Just because your interpretation of a dataset differs from the government’s interpretation does not make it fake news. If the government sets itself up to fact-check information about itself, the first abuse may be to deny information that is inconvenient to the government.
This is not a hypothetical situation. In the year In September 2019, a journalist was arrested by the police for trying to defame the government after he filmed school children eating only salt from a full government meal. Roti.
In the year In November 2021, two journalists, Samridhi Sakunia and Swarna Jha, were arrested for covering anti-Muslim violence in the northeastern state of Tripura. They were accused of reporting “fake news”.
Although it has a proven record of corporate objectivity, non-binding, government-sponsored fact-checking is done through the government’s Press Information Bureau.
The media watch website newslaundry.com has compiled a number of PIB “fact checks” in which the bureau simply labels inconvenient reports as “false” or “baseless” without providing any concrete evidence.
In June 2022, Tapasia, a reporter for the investigative journalism organization The Reporters Collective, wrote that the Indian government is forcing children under the age of six to carry an Aadhaar biometric ID card to get food at government-run centers. Decision of the Supreme Court of India.
A PIB fact check flagged the story as fake. When Tapasya asked under the Right to Information Act (Freedom of Information Act) about the process behind the label, PIB simply attached a tweet from the Ministry of Women and Child Development saying the story was false – in other words, PIB’s fact-check did no independent research.
“Checking the government’s line is not checking reality,” says Tapasya. If the new IT rules come into force in June 2022, the government could have put my story on the internet.
Social media companies have sometimes pushed back against the Indian government’s attempts to control what can be published online. But the IFF doesn’t expect Wagre to put up much of a fight this time around. “No one wants litigation, no one wants to jeopardize the safe harbor,” he said, referring to “safe harbor” rules that prevent platforms from being held liable for content posted by users. “There could be mechanical compliance, and perhaps even pre-censorship of views they know.”
Kamra declined to comment on his hopes of challenging the new laws. But he says the health of democracy is questionable when the government wants to control sources of information. “This is not what democracy looks like,” he says. “There are many problems with social media. It was harmful in the past. But more government control is not the answer.
