But he adds that his legal challenge is not about him. “This is bigger than any profession. It will affect everyone,” he says.
He points out wide discrepancies between the official account of the impact of Covid in the country and the evaluation of international agencies. “The WHO has said that covid deaths in India were about 10 times the official count. Anyone who refers to that could be labeled a fake news peddler, and would have to be removed.”
In April 2021, India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, was devastated by a second wave of covid-19 and severe oxygen shortages in hospitals. The state government denied there was a problem. In the midst of this unfolding crisis, a man tweeted an SOS call asking for oxygen to save his dying grandfather. State authorities accused him of rumors and panic.
Experts believe India’s IT rule amendments would allow for more of this kind of crackdown, under a government that has already extended its powers across the internet, forcing social media platforms to remove critical voices and using emergency powers to censor a BBC documentary Modi critic.
Prateek Waghre, policy director at the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital freedoms organization, says Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) social media team has freely spread misinformation on political opponents and critics, while “reporters who go to the ground and expose the inconvenient truth have faced consequences.”
Waghre says that a lack of clarity about what constitutes fake news makes matters even worse. “Looking at the same data set, it’s possible that two people could come to different conclusions,” she adds. “Just because your interpretation of that data set is different from the government’s doesn’t mean it’s fake news. If the government is putting itself in a position to verify information about itself, the first likely misuse would be against information that is not convenient for the government.”
This is not a hypothetical scenario. In September 2019, police booked a journalist for allegedly trying to smear the government after recording schoolchildren who were supposed to receive full meals from the state eating only salt and Roti.
In November 2021, two journalists, Samriddhi Sakunia and Swarna Jha, were arrested for reporting on violence against Muslims that had broken out in the northeastern state of Tripura. They were accused of reporting “fake news”.
Non-binding, state-backed fact checks are already conducted through the government’s Press Information Office, despite that organization’s checkered record of objectivity.
Media surveillance website laundrynews.com compiled a series of PIB “fact checks” and found that the Bureau simply labels inconvenient reports as “false” or “unsubstantiated” without providing any concrete evidence.
In June 2022, Tapasya, a reporter for the investigative journalism organization The Reporters’ Collective, wrote that the Indian government required children under the age of six to obtain an Aadhar biometric ID card in order to access food at the centers. run by the government, in defiance of a Judgment of the Supreme Court of India.
The GDP Fact Check quickly labeled the story false. When Tapasya inquired under the Right to Information Act (a freedom of information law) about the procedure behind the labeling, PIB simply attached a tweet from the Ministry of Women and Child Development, which claimed the story was false; in other words, the fact that GDP Check had not conducted any independent investigation.
“Repeating the government line is not checking the facts,” says Tapasya. “The government could have had my story removed from the internet if the new IT rules had come into play in June 2022.”
Social media companies have sometimes rejected attempts by the Indian government to impose controls on what can be posted online. But the IFF’s Waghre doesn’t expect them to put up much of a fight this time. “Nobody wants litigation, nobody wants to risk their safe harbor,” he says, referring to “safe harbor” rules that protect platforms from being held liable for content posted by their users. “There is likely to be mechanical compliance, and possibly even proactive censorship of reviews that they know are likely to get flagged.”
Kamra declined to comment on his chances of challenging the new rules. But he says the health of a democracy is in question when the government wants to control the sources of information. “This is not what democracy looks like,” he says. “There are several problems with social media. It has been detrimental in the past. But more government control is not the solution.”
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