Democratic India’s dissent curbed; similar to that of the great firewall of Communist China
China controls dissent online using the great firewall, India under the leadership of PM Modi is employing similar tactics to hide criticism of its pandemic handling.
The authoritarian Chinese Communist Party uses a digital strategy called the great firewall- a combination of legislation and actions to censor its domestic internet. It not only employs its own methods of blocking dissent but also forces internet service providers and social media platforms to hide and remove sensitive topics related to the government, political movements, and protests from the gaze of its public.
India despite being a democracy has done the same thing when a trending hashtag demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister due to his bad pandemic handling was censored on Facebook.
Posts with the hashtag-#ResignModi were hidden to the Indian public for about 3 hours, but the same was accessible to people living outside India in countries like the US, UK, etc. This comes in the same week when on the instructions of the Indian government about 50 tweets critical of Modi’s Covid handling were taken down. Though some were fake news, not all were.
The social media giant initially said that it did the same because some of the posts were against its community standards, but as the news gained traction in the media Facebook backtracked and allowed these posts to be displayed.
The Indian government denied its role in the censorship which was later affirmed by the official spokesperson of Facebook.
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said, “We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake, not because the Indian government asked us to, and have since restored it.”
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology shared a statement on the Koo app — India’s rival to Twitter — saying, “A story by Wall Street Journal attributing removal of a certain hashtag by Facebook to GOI‘s efforts to curb public dissent is misleading on facts and mischievous in intent. Govt has not issued any direction to remove this hashtag. Facebook has also clarified that it was removed by mistake.”
If indeed the Indian Government had nothing to do with the censorship, then the social media giant should come clear and explain under which context its community guidelines were violated. This clarification is a must to upheld free speech in a democratic county like India, particularly when aspersions of Facebook management having links to top ruling politicians were cast earlier.
