Will India Ban Twitter?
platformer.news
platformer.news
With all this outrage generated on Twitter, I really wonder how much of a role Twitter is playing in incitement(s). Would I be sad to see Twitter go? To some extent... there are some great people I follow on Twitter. But the platform itself, I tend to see as a force of evil.
It's exactly like that in America too.
It's so easy to co-opt this too. One person got access to the shared google doc where they store the next tweets that need to be trending and changed it to something critical of Modi. It was promptly tweeted out regardless by government ministers who said "working for the middle class is low on the agenda of Modi Govt" and "Modi govt has not made inclusive development as the focal point".
(https://twitter.com/free_thinker/status/1095571793233043456?...)
It's not the number of tweets that should build a trend, but number of authentic facts that is backing it up. I wish there was a platform which shows facts leading up to a certain tweet - for both sides. So that immediately, I can compare the reality.
Exactly my thoughts the last couple of weeks. I think world would be a much better place if platforms like Twitter or Facebook doesn't exist. All they are doing now is spreading hatred and divisiveness in our societies, be it USA or India. I left Facebook back in 2012. And quit Twitter & Reddit for good this week.
As this will inevitably (sadly) become the norm, I fully expect we'll see the same in the U.S. in relatively short time. Hopefully that's too pessimistic; but, to be prepared -- what is the state of the art of HAM-based networking in the U.S.?
* Authentication is allowed but the contents of the messages cannot be concealed.
If you did start transmitting encrypted stuff on the ham bands someone would probably foxhunt you (even if you were doing it for "civil disobedience") and ask you politely to stop before reporting you to the FCC. You could of course work outside of the ham bands but then what you're doing would be illegal for other reasons.
What Twitter started with when it decided to become the arbiter of what is allowed on the platform, and what constitutes inciting violence and unrest, it opened a slippery slope.
I read about the hashtag in question and it definitely seems like one can spin it as people inciting unrest and violence similar to what happened few weeks back. Twitter lost the moral ground here as soon as it decided to wade into what constitutes good speech and what not.
Anyway, Twitter has been a toxic platform for a while now. It just has managed to evade the scrutiny FB gets. Just look at the sort of activism that goes around there which is related to the current issue. https://www.wsj.com/articles/rihanna-rallies-to-the-wrong-ca...
You can game any system like that - instagram etc
Why do you think Rihanna would need 2.5M for such a tweet when her any collaboration can make her much, much more money?
Just because she did not sing to your tunes so you thought you can accuse her like that.
Almost every organic trending thing like this starts off with PR firms getting celebrities. Most celebrities tweets and instas are sponsored
https://theprint.in/diplomacy/canada-firm-mp-pr-person-suspe...
According to sources, it was Skyrocket that allegedly paid $2.5 million to popstar Rihanna to tweet in support of the farmers’ protest in India. Dhaliwal, the sources said, is a Canada-based Sikh who is a “self-proclaimed Sikh separatist” and is also close to Jagmeet Singh.
FFS
Moreover, the bulk of the population won't really be affected by a Twitter ban - they aren't on it, and make most of the voter pool.
Rihannas tweeted about some political protest, but it was later established she was paid for the tweet. SM platforms have a responsbility to declare political endorsements.
They just banned internet for million or so people in Kashmir.
Outright internet vban, twitter ban is nothing
Being running a purely internet business I can completely understand the pain and frustration it would have caused. However, if I see the bigger picture, Lack of ban would have caused hundred of lives in the aftermath of change in constitutional status of the J&K. It's like lockdown that we all had to endure to save lives.
You have the right to your opinion but this is how I see it.
Take Care
0: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kashmir-internet-4g-...
Your words sound like you support implementing laws, then clamping down on any avenues of dissent until things cool down aka people get tired and carry on all the while the motive behind laws is achieved, people be damned? that so? is that what is meant by "democracy" in 2021 ?
My impression of Kashmir is that the situation hasn’t been positive for a very long time, and all the other factors are either less true or don’t apply.
It is quite a controversial topic and when someone looking from outside can't even gauge the recent issue at hand correctly[1], you can't expect them to have the context of Kashmir issue.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/rihanna-rallies-to-the-wrong-ca...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_guerrilla_movements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_rebel_groups
kashmir has been fighting against both india and pakistan on many fronts ever since this issue began. the state of kashmir has been essentially fighting war of independence against foreign oppressive rule for the past 500 years.
so what 30 years ago pakistan convinced and managed to turn thousands of kashmiris as pawns in a proxy war with india. that doesnt mean kashmir is with pakistan, on the contrary, people in pakistan occupied kashmir protest against their oppression daily.
why do you think just because someone picked a gun that they have muddied the waters and only way out is to surrender because you cannot do an armed struggle?
> the state of kashmir has been essentially fighting war of independence against foreign oppressive rule for the past 500 years.
But what constitutes foreign rule. If I move before 500 years, we have Mauryas or Karkotas ruling Kashmir with Srinagar being an important city to them, which are pan North Indian empires.
> why do you think just because someone picked a gun that they have muddied the waters and only way out is to surrender because you cannot do an armed struggle?
Well, I think once a struggle turns violent, the issue becomes emotive on both sides as there is blood shed. For people in Kashmir, it has been since 1947, wounds of which keep opening up again. For people in rest of India, the narrative and the blood of the people from RoI which has been spent in keeping Kashmir has been huge as well.
No one would want to back down, the armed insurgent movement is never going to succeed.
My second point was, some of the groups are motivated on religious lines and want a country based on a religion which makes it extremely hard for others to sympathise for them.
Also, you are talking about the same person who gave away land in other states, even the Himalayan ones to the community. They had very limited presence there before.
If you read the history of the religion and subcontinent, there is no reason he would even want to weaken them as well. Leaving the small separatist voices aside, the vast majority is so intermingled with the dominant religion in North India, that there is no reason to do this.
Anyway, it seems you are even less aware about this topic than most people are. I am not sure where you are getting your information from, but reading from your charged language I can only ask you to not fall for hyperbole and look at things pragmatically.
>Punjab and Haryana have different dominant languages
A lot of Punjabi-speaking Hindus "chose" Hindi for that to be true IIRC.
It is not like any land exchange happened. Sure, some resources got divided but I wouldn't see it as settling. If you read analysis about management of big states, even now a lot of analysts believe some of the other big states should be split up.
> What I will say is that Sikhs I met in USA were not happy with say splitting Chandigarh.
Well, that's not representative of them, no? I have also met people who are not happy with that decision and also people who are indifferent to it.
> A lot of Punjabi-speaking Hindus "chose" Hindi for that to be true IIRC.
Not really, look at any language census from before as well in the districts that became the new state.
But the linguistic issue is not just limited to that state. Look at the northern Himalayan states and look at what has happened to their languages. Hindi has just subsumed their languages with its words and now most people speak Hindi only. This situation is made worse because of the necessity of English as a language, their own mother tongue kind of becomes third in the priority list.
>an estimated 20,000–100,000 Muslims were massacred.
yes. you are right. i do remember displacement but it does not hold a candle to 1947 jammu massacres. what do you think? who are more important? 100k deaths or 219?
https://www.thehindu.com/news/ldquo219-Kashmiri-Pandits-kill...
https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/right-wing-exaggerate...
this article in the print literally says the figures are exaggerated
> the Jammu province which was contiguous to Punjab, experienced mass migration that led to violent inter-religious activity. Large numbers of Hindus and Sikhs from Rawalpindi and Sialkot started arriving since March 1947, bringing "harrowing stories of Muslim atrocities in West Punjab". According to scholar Ilyas Chattha, this provoked counter-violence on Jammu Muslims, which had "many parallels with that in Sialkot". He writes, "the Kashmiri Muslims were to pay a heavy price in September–October 1947 for the earlier violence of West Punjab."
Additionally, Pandits have been on the receiving end - once a majority of the Kashmiri population about 600 years ago. Seven times at least they've been forced to exit, countless killed or forcefully converted to Islam https://www.quora.com/What-atrocities-were-committed-on-Kash... But despite all this, Pandits have never opted for taking arms in hands and become terrorist killing civilians.
You made my point.
India’s democratically elected govt has the legal right to block the internet to prevent such massacres in the future.
https://theprint.in/india/governance/4g-mobile-internet-serv...
Details of the software behind an online forum make a big difference to how the forum affects its participants and the society they are part of. It would take a long article to begin to describe exactly how the details of Twitter are bad, but as a start we might notice how difficult it is for a reader to find the responses to a particular contribution (tweet) and how difficult it is for the writer of a response to predict which readers will see the response -- making Twitter a worse tool for arriving at collective truth than are most online fora or at least worse than most pre-social-media online fora. We might notice that (probably for complicated reasons, perhaps partly because it is a bad tool for online truth-finding) experience has revealed that Twitter is more likely to assist in the formation of an online mob than other online fora are.
On second thought, it would be bad for my government to ban Twitter, but I still wish more people would decide to stop using it.
The farmers were peacefully protesting and the government has reacted by attacking them quite brutally etc.. recently they've also issued FIRs (effectively arrest warrants) for foreigners who've voiced their support for the farmers on Twitter.
Generally the government is trying to keep exposure to these events as low as possible. Twitter is obviously not beholden to their wishes.
The fact remains though that many are unhappy about it and have been attacked violently. The fact is that the police have filed FIRs against people for voicing support.
Those are the salient points to this discussion on whether India will ban Twitter or not
The other point is about involvement of shady organizations.
There is evidence that the protests were planned in advance. Greta Thunberg seems to be involved. I have read the document which was published on Cryptpad. While the document is not really encouraging violence, it does have phrases which clearly intend to malign India's image. A Canadian outfit called 'poetic justice' is also involved.
read the article from the Print https://theprint.in/diplomacy/canada-firm-mp-pr-person-suspe...
and this is the link for the toolkit https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/ehTz+drfKPwi4fP5dn0mivw...
while the toolkit does not directly incite violence , it clearly mentions that the plan was followed per schedule. the protests were already planned despite the leaders of protests giving their word that the protests would be peaceful on the republic day.
the toolkit reveals intentions to malign India by asking people all over the world to protest infront of Indian embassies
Anybody can spread awareness like this. John Oliver did like this many times e.g. during net neutrality, he asked all trolls to write complain to FCC.
This is how less powerful can organise online. Meanwhile Indian govt and it's cyber gang is the one who is making sportsperson and celebrities to post some copy paste tweet to counter this. This is what gov propaganda looks like.
but did you consider the possibility that some of those celebrities truly want things to be settled peacefully?
could Mia , Rihanna and Greta be also not part of a propaganda?
Even if both sides are using propaganda as a weapon, atleast celebrities like Sachin Tendulkar are not spreading lies. They are only giving a positive message. They want the whole matter to be solved and for that it's the Indian government and the Indian farmers who have to work together.
Gov doesn't want to work together, they made the law and want everyone to obey them.
So anyone criticizing India is involved in a global conspiracy to malign it?
As an Indian, I am dissapointed in how quickly this country has turned on its own people in the name of the ruling party. Where does it end?
What does someone from UK understand about Indian farmers? By all means protest in India - without resorting to violence. No point in protesting in other country unless you think that will create external pressure on the Indian government. Here the government is willing to talk further, even put a stay on the laws for 18 months , but the protestors just do not want to collaborate.
I agree that the government should have been transparent from the beginning. The stubbornness of ruling government escalated situation. But atleast now they are ready to talk. Why do the protesters still want to keep escalating by resorting to violence?
Those who are ok with it, don't have that protection, already get much lower payment than what they should, law does not effect them. This is the vast majority of farmers btw. So they don't care.
But saying just because vast majority ok without knowing what is going on is very shellfish. Educate yourself before making allegations.
The protests were generally peaceful, but recently on our republic day we cannot say it remained peaceful. I think government should have first spent time in making people understand the pros/cons of the changes and take their feedback if they are ready. Any protests long drawn, can turn violent.
My personal take on this is that farmers are not ready yet to face the corporate world as buyers. This law should come, but not now. And Government can build an intermediary organization to work with both mandis and corporates - but again, whenever government builds something in India, the officers appointed use corruption to take it from useful to useless. So that also won't work. I don't know, what can solve this issue apart from government holding off the laws. They are saying they can put the law on hold for 1.5 years, but the protest is at a stage where they want it to be totally taken back. The case is also in supreme court of India where I think they have made a committee to solve this. But I believe protesters are very concerned about livelihood post these laws. I guess that's the trouble with big changes like this, it can impact people positively/negatively in short term but might boost the economy in long run. It's important to protect people during these major changes also. May be NGOs can be used to first raise awareness - small A/B test can be done with experiment group. I don't know why governments don't do incremental changes slowly.
Having said that, I think the new laws are good for India. These are the arguments I have heard in favor of the new laws:
India introduced the current MSP related system back in 1960 to inspire farmers to grow those crops when India had a huge shortage of food grains, and was importing food directly from US (google 'ship to mouth india'). That is not the case now. India actually has a surplus of those grains.
Also, MSP covers only something like 15-26 food crops produced in India. For example, we all saw how onion prices dropped to insanely low prices last 2 years. There was no MSP for them. Just yesterday, there was news of a farmer in UP dumping 1000 kg cauliflower because of low prices.
Also, I believe this MSP cover is available only in certain states, which puts other states at a disadvantage. To make things complicated, there is a law that guarantees certain grains at low price for the poor. For example, the govt will give rice at 3 rupees to the poor. Govt has to buy the rice from the farmers because of the MSP system (say at Rs 20), and then in turn sell them to the poor at Rs.3 in a state which doesn't have MSP, thus putting the farmers in the non MSP states at a huge disadvantage.
Another reason I heard is that farmers are producing huge amounts of MSP crops such as rice and wheat because the price is guaranteed, while ignoring other crops that India has to heavily import (such as ground nut). The govt has to purchase the MSP grains no matter what, and the godowns have way more in stock than India could distribute (almost double or more last year).
Also, some of these MSP crops like rice require lot of water for cultivation, and considering the shortage of water in most places in India, govt wants to reduce the farming of such crops.
Also, the world is seeing rise of social media platforms over governments where a celebrity can tweet and ask their followers to attack a building or start a protest. In such a novel volatile environment it's very important for governments to adapt and understand their population. And I also read that this change was in discussion already from a decade and also present in manifesto of the opposition party. It's a loss making system for government and the taxes we are paying are balancing that loss. As far as I can deduce, MSP has become a welfare scheme now. I wish, it would have not become the mess it is now and farmers could have also feel safer to move to open market and compete globally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_Indian_farme...
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/farmers-protest-states...
This is false. They are removing the restriction that all produce has to be sold in a APMCs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_produce_market_co...)
Such an attack on democracy should not be allowed.
Indian flag was not even touched. Stop spreading lies.
There's not even a single other instance where flag was disrespected during last 4+ months. So, why it happened only there? It was conspired and scripted by govt to malign the movement. The entry gates were also not secure.
There is no excuse for political violence in a democracy.
Those who committed it and their enablers and supporters should be brought to justice.
Don’t spread conspiracy theories without evidence.
Police are strict - you blame the govt. Police are lax - you blame the govt.
No winning with anti democratic forces.
Have some strength to hear the facts