But he added that his legal challenge is not about him. “This is bigger than any profession. It will affect everyone,” he said.
He pointed to a big difference between the official account of Covid’s impact on the country and the assessment by international agencies. “WHO has said that the number of Covid deaths in India is about 10 times higher than the official figure. Anyone who even mentions that could be considered a fake news peddler and it will have to be taken down.”
In April 2021, India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, was ravaged by a second wave of Covid-19 and severe oxygen shortages in hospitals. The state government denies there is a problem. In the midst of this ongoing crisis, one man tweeted an SOS call for oxygen to save his dying grandfather. State authorities accused him of spreading false rumors and causing panic.
Experts believe that amendments to India’s IT rules will make this kind of repression more likely, under a government that has expanded its powers over the internet, forcing platforms Social media must remove critical voices and use emergency powers to censor a BBC documentary criticize Modi.
Prateek Waghre, policy director of the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital freedom organization, said Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) social media team had itself freely spreading misinformation about political opponents and critics, while “reporters who came down to the scene and delivered the inconvenient truth had to face the consequences.”
Waghre says the lack of clarity about what constitutes fake news makes matters worse. He added: “Looking at the same data set, it is possible that two people will come to different conclusions. “Just because your interpretation of that dataset is different from the government’s doesn’t make it fake news. If the government puts itself in a position of fact-checking information about itself, the first possibility of its abuse would be against information that is detrimental to the government.”
This is not a hypothetical scenario. In September 2019, a journalist was arrested by police for allegedly trying to smear the government after recording students who were supposed to be fully fed by the state eating only salt and water. Roti.
In November 2021, two journalists, Samriddhi Sakunia and Swarna Jha, were arrested for covering the outbreak of anti-Muslim violence in the northeastern state of Tripura. They were charged with spreading fake news.
The non-binding, state-backed fact-checking took place through the government’s Press Information Bureau, despite that organization’s verifiable record of objectivity.
Media viewing site newslaundry.com compiled a number of PIB “fact checks” and found that the Bureau simply labeled the reports inconveniently as “false” or “baseless” without providing any concrete evidence. any.
In June 2022, Tapasya, a reporter with investigative journalism organization The Reporters’ Collective, wrote that the Indian government requires children aged six and under to have an Aadhar biometric identification card in order to continue access to food at government-run centers—despite government bans. Judgment of the Supreme Court of India.
PIB Fact Check was quick to label the story as fake. When Tapasya asked under the Right to Information Act (freedom of information law) about the procedure behind the labeling, PIB simply attached a tweet from the Department of Women and Child Development, claiming that the story is fake—in other words, the Truth of PIB Check has not done any independent research.
“Restating the government line is not a fact check,” says Tapasya. “The government could have taken my story down on the internet if the new IT rules had come into effect in June 2022.”
Social media companies have sometimes pushed back against the Indian government’s attempt to impose controls over what can be published online. But IFF’s Waghre doesn’t expect them to fight this many times. “Nobody wants to sue, nobody wants to risk their safe harbor,” he said, referring to “safe harbor” rules that protect platforms from liability. about content posted by their users. “There will likely be machine compliance and possibly even proactive moderating of views that they know are likely to be flagged.”
Kamra did not wish to comment on his prospects of challenging the new rules. But he said the health of democracy was in question as the government wanted to control sources of information. “This is not a form of democracy,” he said. “There are some problems with social media. It has been harmful in the past. But more government control is not the solution to it.”
