In a connected world where anybody can put their thoughts on the Internet, should the Government monitor themIJ
The British thespian Stephen Fry has a wonderful podcast available called ‘Great leap Years’ and in one of the episodes he describes the aftermath of an invention by Johannes Gutenberg. The invention was the printing press, an invention that took the monopoly of the written word away from the Catholic Church in Europe. And in the three centuries following the invention of the printing press, democratisation of the printed word led to utter chaos. Printing, despite what we would today consider the tedious process of typesetting, allowed individuals to take out pamphlets against political and business rivals, run scurrilous allegations in short books and even novels, sometimes in delightful language, all in relative anonymity. Sounds familiarIJ Because events of the past decade ever since Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp came into our lives seem to be eerily familiar. The problem is that just as Governments could not stop the spread of malicious information of the printed word back in the day, it is almost impossible to stop the spread of misinformation today unless one already has a system in place like the Great Firewall in China and no country which has a semblance of democracy can do that. The Government’s plan of monitoring social media chatter, therefore, is a bad one because this will be not be our intelligence services monitoring terrorist chatter; that happens today and should continue to happen. This will be monitoring of thoughts and ideas on social media. This newspaper agrees that social media posts can spread false information and be slanderous in equal measure. There already exist laws to combat this and like the solution to many other systemic problems in India is to fix the judicial system. Quick and easy defamation suits as well as criminal prosecutions for threats must be ensured.
For example, the speed with which police acted when a family member of Priyanka Chaturvedi, a Congress leader, was threatened in the most despicable manner on Twitter was commendable. But others face harassment on social media everyday; similar alacrity must be shown in their cases too. A centrally-monitored ‘social media cell’ cannot claim to be politically neutral. One party is in power today, another might come tomorrow and the potential for misuse of such a monitoring cell is huge, much like the potential misuse of Section 66(A) of the Information Technology Act (later struck down) which was pushed through by the previous Government. Much like the printed word sobered down eventually, the rampant spread of misinformation on the Internet will also cease with punitive legal action being made quick and the recognition of reliable sources of information growing among consumers. Problem is that technology giants have hollowed out the business models of most news organisations.