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Comment by amriksohata | Hacker News Reader

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amriksohata

Bit of an odd article, man makes defamatory and false tweet, gets arrested for defamation, cries free speech?

Making such a remark is equivalent of calling someone here a nazi etc. Hardly newsworthy

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[parent] > Making such a remark is equivalent of calling someone here a nazi etc. Hardly newsworthy

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[answer] > Indeed and better reasoning explained here over guardian [...]

Are you trying to answer from alternate account @amreeksohata, to hustle traffic? Making a comment & replying it as an legitimate answer looks bit confusing & suspicious otherwise.

I should have probably edited the original one

From the article:

> He was arrested on Thursday on accusations of attempting to disturb “public tranquillity and peace”, the police said.

Disturbing public tranquility and peace != defamation

Where is “here”? In the US, for example, defamation is a tort, not a criminal offense. And calling the president or any other public figure a “Nazi” would be totally safe.

The Grauniad is a U.K. newspaper. They're criticizing India for something that happens all the time in their own country. A total double standard.

The article was a rather neutral reporting of facts. The facts should be embarrassing to India, but that’s not the newspaper’s fault.

The Guardian often reports on similar issues occurring within the UK. Here are just two examples:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/14/transgender-...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/04/gender-criti...

So you are utterly mistaken.

Guardian largely doesn't publish false news as such but is incredibly selective about the events it chooses to write about.

Every newspaper is narrowly selective about what it writes about. Clearly the Guardian has chosen to write about free speech issues within the UK, regularly, putting the lie to what zozbot234 implied.

In the UK, yes. But my point was, recent incidents of suppression of free speech through law enforcement agencies by other parties in India haven't made it to Guardian coverage like this has. So they are selective about what they choose to write.

Guardian is as infallible as any other media organisation run by humans who have their own biases.

Interesting. In regards to some countries this type of comparison is "whataboutism" and for others it is "total double standard"

What? Telling a lie and calling names is not worthy of arrest in India? If so it's even more newsworthy :)

I'm surprised he doesn't have parliamentary immunity/privilege.

Adding to your point, people have been arrested for similarly offensive tweets in the U.K. too. Yet I have not seen much concern for free speech rights in the Grauniad. Why is India being singled out here? It looks like old colonial attitudes resurfacing again, where exotic colonial dependents are always stereotyped as "backward".

> people have been arrested for similarly offensive tweets in the U.K. too

A member of Parliament? For something as vague as “attempting to disturb ‘public tranquillity and peace’”?

> old colonial attitudes

When non-MP Brits were arrested for similar nonsense, was the public’s response whataboutism and appeals to colonial victimhood?

Same weird misspelling of the newspaper’s name in two different comments? How does that happen?

It's a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#:~:text=Frequent%....

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