SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS WILL HAVE TO FOLLOW INDIA’S LAWS IN INDIA

Gone are the days when social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were harmless places to socialize, discover old and new friends, to post photos and the like. Now they are “Big Tech”, with an opinion of their own, prone to muzzling contrarian views, and seemingly not accountable to the law of the land, even though that land is their biggest market, as in the case of Facebook with India. The keyboard warriors of Big Tech can de-platform the President of the United States at the click of the mouse, eliminate competition by not providing them with a platform—as with the “right-wing” app Parler—take ideologically extreme-left positions, and behave like a Communist dictatorship, even though using capitalist ways and means to make money, which includes selling user data. Platforms that were supposed to give voices to differing views are now into editorialising and censorship, where even reputed media outlets can have their accounts suspended for writing against political leaders backed by the owners and employees of social media platforms. This happened in the case of New York Post when it was suspended by Twitter for reporting on Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Big Tech—essentially a few private companies—believes that its behemoth status gives it the right to rise above governments and delegitimize opinion if it does not conform with their positions. With these positions driven by financial and/or ideological reasons, articles that are extremely critical of China may get blocked by one platform, while another platform can mark as “manipulated”, material shared by senior government ministers, just because the platform does not like the dispensation in power in a particular country—India in this case. Left unchecked, Big Tech invariably tries to play a political role in democracies by controlling narratives, influencing elections, and by overriding democratic institutions. And worse, all this it does while preaching about freedom of speech and liberty. As per this, Taliban and other terror supporting groups and radicals and extremists can maintain an online presence, Pakistan can launch anti India propaganda based on fabrications, but a Hindi movie star, Kangana Ranaut gets de-platformed because she is branded as hateful by some of those high-horsing with their keyboards in Twitter’s office. And if the country is India, these social media platforms think that they can treat it like a third world banana republic whose laws they don’t need to follow. CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey may be open to facing Congressional hearings in the US over the conduct of their platforms, but they will not do so in India, as we have seen in the case of Jack Dorsey, who was summoned to face a Parliamentary committee, but flatly refused.

WhatsApp users in Europe can opt out of the platform’s new privacy policy, but not those in India, because the European Union has General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which gives users the option of saying no to WhatsApp policy of sharing data with third party users. So why cannot India have its own laws in the interest of its own citizens? It is in this context that the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 have to be seen. The social media companies may discuss these with the government, may even buy time, but they cannot refuse to comply.

WhatsApp has gone to court against one of the clauses of the laws that requires social media platforms to locate the “first originator of the information” if the government asks for it. WhatsApp’s argument is “traceability would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermine people’s right to privacy”—presumably even if that means trying to curb fake messages or anti India activities. Right to privacy is a serious matter, however, by WhatsApp’s logic, that right is not violated when it sells Indian users’ data to advertisers based on the conversations that they have with “business accounts”. As the new WhatsApp policy says, “when you communicate with a business by phone, email, or WhatsApp, it can see what you’re saying and may use that information for its own marketing purposes, which may include advertising on Facebook”.

Government control is generally intrusive in nature. But the social media giants are no saints either. Data mining is their primary focus and censorship is a tool they use liberally. They don’t even store Indian users’ data in India, which has to change. But first the message needs to go across that to operate in India, India’s laws will have to be followed..