The Government of India has finally taken a page out of China’s Book. The Government has informed the Apex court of India that they will be presenting new laws for regulating social media websites and other services that create digital content.
Censorship for India Ahead?
As per the government, “The internet has emerged as a potent tool to cause unimaginable disruption to the democratic polity.” Regulation of intermediaries is to be required to tackle the threats catering to the nation’s integrity, sovereignty, and security that come with the service.
The Government of India had introduced a set of Guidelines that considered social media services having more than 5 million users as intermediaries. As per them, the revision of the rules is ongoing, and several associations and social media companies will be taken into consideration.
This procedure has been scheduled to complete by early 2020. The social media giant had moved to the Apex court after the guidelines said that the interlinking of Aadhaar to Whatsapp would be breaking the end-end encryption put in place by Facebook to protect user privacy.
This move has come in after the introduction of cheap and fast internet by a particular network provider. This affordable and fast internet has led to an “exponential rise in hate speech, fake news, public order, anti-national activities, defamatory postings, and other unlawful activities using internet/social media platforms.” as per the words of Indian Government.
The thing that now remains to see if the Social Media giants give in to the demand of a government that claims security reasons to keep an eye on its citizens.