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The Union government has summoned Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, and given senior staff from the firm a dressing down. Publicly, the reason is the brief removal, in India, of a video message by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, the government is hardly making a secret of its intent to nudge Meta to suppress posts of protests such as the one at Jantar Mantar. A barrage of takedown notices have already erased or suppressed some of the more emblematic forms of the protests. Instagram Reels, where users are shown automatically recommended posts from various creators, have emerged as one of the most influential forms of mass media in the country. Seeking suppression of political speech on such a platform would put India in unenviable company, joining the ranks of Pakistan, where TikTok was banned for some time in 2021 until it agreed to \u201ccontrol immoral\/indecent content\u201d. More importantly, it would bring India much closer to the tightly controlled digital ecosystem of China, where nearly all dissent is wiped out in mere minutes. All that possibly stands in the way of India\u2019s cyberspace drifting to that status quo is a lack of capacity to check posts in real time, a \u201cproblem\u201d that is ripe for a destructive AI-based solution.<\/p>\n
Meta is no bastion of resistance in spite of being a central site of the mobilisations over the last few weeks. For months, it has crawled when asked to bend, by needlessly taking down every post referred to it under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, a censorship route that merely notifies platforms that the reporting agency feels the content referred to is illegal. Despite posts taken down under this section almost never going to court, Meta has uniformly chosen to comply automatically. This has set the stage for the arm-twisting that the government appears to be undertaking. The conditions that enabled widespread censorship in China were fostered over the decades preceding the Internet\u2019s growth. In the absence of those conditions, and in the absence of a single-party system with a stated ideological commitment to centralise control, the Internet cannot be tamed. But warping the public\u2019s cultural self-perception is damaging for society, and must be stopped. These draconian measures can be used by successive governments if left unchecked. The current dispensation has drawn the wrong lesson from the protests and the accompanying online zeitgeist. Mass mobilisations are the lifeblood of democracy, not an aberration that bears no repetition.<\/p>\n
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