Indian government empowers itself to “fact check,” delete social media posts
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I didn't look at which side any of these accounts were arguing for or against, because it doesn't matter and we don't care. Commenters here need to follow the site guidelines regardless of what their beliefs are, how right they are or feel they are, or how wrong others are or they feel they are.
This new body seems to be a tool to suppress dissent and promote the fake news machinery Government and the ruling party is notorious for.
https://www.cnbctv18.com/india/alt-news-pratik-sinha-mohamma...
You will not be treated well if you criticise the government.
Local and politicized news in India is notoriously biased. But the direction of the bias varies from news org to news org. Somehow, American & British news orgs are notorious for giving megaphones to the worst faith actors within Indian politics.
I've found that ThePrint is the closest thing to centrist-neutral reporting in India. They are pretty open about leaning left*[1] on social issues and leaning right [2] on economic issues.
[1] The left-right division doesn't work as cleanly in India, but left for the Print means separation of church & state, live-n-let-live, individual freedoms, LGBT support, a kind of French secularism.
[2] which in an Indian context means left of Biden, but right of pre-1991 socialist India. ie. Welfare-ist, but not isolationist.
> because Indian Government recently jailed an independent fact checker for a tweet he made 4 years ago.
Are you contending the fact that a 4 year old tweet was used to suppress an Altnews? This ad-hominem attack may have basis, but the assertion that there is very filthy gross things being used to suppress doesn't seem to have been addressed.
And it seems like gross government indecency from where I stand. You're talking about ethics in journalism, but this seemingly is a case of government jailing & taking away someone's right, which seems like an act that requires a much much higher standard of conduct than antagonistic-left journalism.
And the Modi apologist shows up because Altnews has been fact checking right wing misinformation for several years now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rappler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Ressa
The Peace Research Institute Oslo nominated the Alt News founders (Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha) for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize after Zubair was jailed for "hurting religious sentiments" in retaliation for his journalism.
Today? I'm not sure you're right about which is the greater threat.
Yes, state censorship can be abused. But promoting misinformation is a known threat to Democracy today. Right now.
I'm not sure what the real answer should be. If "the market" manages to get the propaganda farms' misinformation under control, then great. If they don't, the only answer I can see is for government to step in.
As they say, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Dying to protect absolute freedom of speech when bad actors are abusing it to destroy the country is not wise.
Shouldn't we farm that out to a third party?
Presumably because much of the lies and disinformation going around involves them to start with. When some nutjob starts posting about something like millions of American citizens being locked up in FEMA camps, or claiming that a proposed healthcare bill calls for the formation of a government death panel any respectable fact checking org is going to end up asking the lawmakers and FEMA about it anyway so government certainly has a role here.
Ideally, each social media platform would have their own people catching and flagging the worst examples of disinformation and that might also involve enlisting the services of both governments and vetted independent third parties.
In my limited experience on social media where I don't see any official flags for misinformation I've seen plenty of cases where it's other users stepping in and correcting outright lies and common misconceptions complete with sources. That probably works better in some spaces than others though.
But let's take something we now know to be true: the NSA collecting data on US citizens. Pre-Snowden, someone could post something asserting that the NSA is spying on us. The government, being the hypothetical arbiter of what is and isn't misinformation, would of course immediately label that as misinformation.
You can't trust the government to be honest here. Sometimes they will even lie for fairly good reasons. But I don't want them marking things as misinformation (or, worse, suppressing such information) when it's true. And they certainly will do that, sometimes.
As long as the fact checking is transparent, there will be an incentive for the fact checker to stay honest and when they fail we should adjust our understanding of what the flag actually means.
I've gone through that already with popular fact checkers like snopes. I still consider it to be a valuable resource, but I've become aware that they allow bias to influence their findings and that they can't be trusted blindly. Really no one source should be blindly trusted and that's something we should be trying to let people know, but warning labels can still be helpful and also revealing about how adversarial our government has become. A government that can't be trusted not to repeatedly mislead the public is one that should be voted out and replaced.
If the people are completely brainwashed by lies that are completely contrary to the truth--like nearly a quarter of our population seems to be at the moment--then they will vote for those with the most convincing lies.
If someone who gets their information from Fox "News"--which has been shown to be less reliable than not watching any news at all--is given an equal vote to those who actually know what's going on, Democracy is subverted. At that point you actually have a "fake Democracy", where the country is actually guided by the propagandists and not the people.
The US is one of a very few Democracies with this absolutist attitude about freedom of speech. It's not a required component of Democracy, and it's ultimately self-destructive, but it's clearly (based on the downvotes and responses to my comment) deeply ingrained.
As an example, Trump should have gotten barely any votes in the last election. He accomplished almost nothing besides stacking the supreme court and passing a deeply unpopular tax cut. Yes, we beat him, but 74M people voted for Trump. And those 74M people, nearly 47% of the voting public, were manipulated by blatantly false Russian and Republican propaganda.
To my mind, the "free speech as a religion" POV is looking like it will be the death of our democracy. If we can't fight misinformation, it may bury the country.
And clearly those on HN disagree. I won't argue with you further. But as things stand, we're circling the drain.
But why is that a good thing? We don't have to have everyone participate. You don't seem to believe in democracy yourself here.
> were manipulated by blatantly false Russian and Republican propaganda.
I think we should be extremely cautious about views that suggest cross sections of the population are not capable agents. Either you're right, 47% of people are manipulated idiots, and the other half are enlightened, or they hold grievances and values you just don't understand.
I'm calling it as I see it. "Being cautious" and trying to be "fair" to the other side has been increasingly destroying the country.
47% of the voters in last election, which is just under 25% of the US population, were in fact manipulated, and are really, in this respect, not capable agents as a result of that manipulation. At the very least they're demonstrably not capable of critical thinking.
I've looked carefully at many explanations as to why MAGAts vote the way they do. It's blatantly obvious that there are a small number of primary motivations.
Aside from "sociopathic self-interest" of some of the 0.1% who simply want lower taxes, everyone else be damned, and a big chunk who reflexively vote Republican as if it's their home team and aren't really paying attention, the main motivator seems to be hate of "the liberals." And no, I don't accept that "hurting more than half of the country" is a reasonable motivation for someone under normal circumstances.
Where did that extreme level of hate come from? Manipulation. Sure there was an underlying anger that the propaganda stoked. People in rural America have it hard and they see all of these rich people in urban areas doing well. But that anger has been fanned to the point where kids knocking on the wrong doors are being shot. And the anger is fundamentally misdirected; these blue-collar folks could tremendously benefit from a higher minimum wage, for instance, and it's not like the Republicans would ever voluntarily vote for a minimum wage increase at this point.
> But why is that a good thing? We don't have to have everyone participate. You don't seem to believe in democracy yourself here.
It's the worst form of government around...aside from all the others that have been tried. (paraphrased Churchill).
I don't know of another form of government that has better results. Neither did Churchill. If we could enforce better national education standards, we'd end up with a better result. But in short term I don't know how to fix the problem other than taking the worst liars off the air.
"We don't have to have everyone participate" -- that sounds too much like a support for voter suppression, which is not what I'm talking about.
> voter suppression
It sounds like your motivation for democracy is that you "owe people" a vote, not that it's actually better to give them it. If education is the factor, what if we gate it by high school, land ownership, or college graduation?
I guess to get back to my original point. You suggested that free information (and misinformation) was a threat to democracy, but I see little indication you believe democracy is important. It's hard to see calls like this as anything other than being upset that the majority is not voting the way you want, and wanting to reign them in.
I never claimed that I was giving the entire picture.
Given that there is ZERO positive that Trump accomplished for rural voters aside from "owning the libs," and many things that were actively negative like starting a trade war that may see rural soy farms permanently out of business, no, I don't think that rural voters are motivated by anything aside from "voting their team" and "trolling the libs."
> I see little indication you believe democracy is important
...trouble with reading comprehension there? I'll simply repeat:
> It's the worst form of government around...aside from all the others that have been tried. (paraphrased Churchill).
> I don't know of another form of government that has better results. Neither did Churchill. If we could enforce better national education standards, we'd end up with a better result. But in short term I don't know how to fix the problem other than taking the worst liars off the air.
But you don't actually care what I'm saying if you follow up with:
> It's hard to see calls like this as anything other than being upset that the majority is not voting the way you want, and wanting to reign them in.
Umm... It wasn't a majority. It was barely 25% of the country. The majority of active voters did in fact vote for Biden.
But enough. You're just trolling at this point.
Democracy is not going to die because people spread false information.
Newspapers have had the monopoly on spreading whatever information they deemed correct (whether it turned out to be or not) for decades and have now lost that and they are pissed.
This is why there is a rise in apparent outcry that all of a sudden anyone and everyone can spread their message broadly where only a handful of organizations could do it before.
There's is no crisis in democracy. As long as the same tools are free to be used to counter whatever fact you think is false then you are free to have an open debate and correct the record.
The government having the power to decide who can say what and what is "true" or "false"... That's the real risk of bringing death to democracy.
That is exactly what is going to happen. People do not have the tools to discern truth given plausible misinformation.
> you are free to have an open debate and correct the record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
> The government having the power to decide who can say what and what is "true" or "false"...
Indeed, that is a risk, but not the only risk.
Then give them the tools.
> Indeed, that is a risk, but not the only risk.
It's not really a risk, it's a fact. Governments routinely lie about plenty of things, and deny things that we later find out to be true.
I would much rather have a bunch of people believe the wrong thing, than have true things labeled as misinformation, or worse, censored.
The onus is on us, as citizens of a free society, to set the record straight, and constantly work to educate people. That's just the responsibility we have to accept. "Freedom isn't free" and all that.
State Censorship is being abused today right now. State Censorship is also a threat to Democracy. It's giving the most powerful institutions the tools to attack Democracy.
Who gets to decide what is mis/mal/dis information? The government? We as human beings are constantly weighing up information and evaluating details to inform our actions. Why do you think they have better tools to decide this for you? Who are these individuals in Government that have worked out all the truths of the world and why do you buy into them deciding this? Has anyone here worked for Government?
All the worlds information isn't easily summed up into Scientific truths that can be instantly fact checked by Government and everything else. This power your giving the government to decide what information you can see and not. Doesn't empower you the citizen to make good decisions. It allows government to sway your information to guide the outcome they want. Which is known as Public Policy, and they have decided that Public Policy is no longer up for debate for the plebs.
Also, there are a lot of good informed guess by scientifics that are reported as Scientific truths. Last month there was a new study that showed that it's good to give peanut butter to children to avoid allergy later, that is the oposite of the standard recommendation during the last decade(s).
Correction, state censorship will be abused. What happens when India elects their version of Trump? Suddenly, what might seem like half-decent system under better leadership becomes a weapon to completely obliterate the news media and target individuals to pursue personal vendettas.
EDIT: If you don't like my comparison, choose any other politician who has documented history of threatening suppression and violence against the free press.
So you should view this action using the same lens you would as any other divisive leader, eg Trump.
the real answer is full transparency. Someone posting a lie is only a problem when no one is allowed to challenge it, and when you allow censorship you are giving someone the authority to prevent challenges to both truth and lies at the same time.
The Constitution has problems and I've love to see some changes to it, but freedom of speech is not something we should abandon. I don't think I've ever met anyone who wants "absolute freedom of speech". Everyone, even our government and courts agree that there are limits, but censorship is not the solution to lies, it is their most efficient breeding ground and it removes our only defense.
We must be able to point out lies and falsehoods no matter where they come from or who is inconvenienced by the truth.
The problem we have now is a populace that is largely uneducated and incapable of telling the truth from a lie or knowing when a source is untrustworthy. We can help to solve that with education and training in basic critical thinking skills. In the meantime we should be exposing and correcting lies publicly and transparently and holding people accountable for knowingly spreading dangerous falsehoods (free to speak still does not mean free from consequences).
We just had the lesson on what the problem with "full transparency" is 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567904
The alternative being proposed here is to accept censorship which allows lies to go unchallenged entirely and makes it impossible to ever correct them.
The fact that people are irrational is why we do not have a direct democracy. Representative democracy, and the existence of constraints in the form of constitution-type documents and term limits, are designed to limit the impact of temporal individual stupidity and crowd stupidity on global outcomes, by constraining the scope of immediate democracy.
> people defend censoring "misinformation" because people (supposedly) cannot discern it from "real" information.
This is overly flippant and strawman-like (conflating government censorship with private company moderation, for example) to what is a massive problem in the age of social media. Vaccine hesitancy, leading to hundreds of thousands of additional dead people, is due to misinformation. There are literal dead people as the end result of this misinformation. Now I for one would prefer that private companies do not censor misinformation, and instead focused on altering the viral dynamics. But this is not a topic to brush under the rug with denialism that misinformation is an actual thing.
I'm afraid that people are looking around, asking themselves that same question, and concluding that democracy has failed.
The problem is that democracy depends on an educated populace and there have been active efforts to dumb people down so that they can be more easily lied to and manipulated. The American people, on average, have the math skills of a 6th grader and their reading skills are worse (https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/). They lack the critical thinking skills to compete with sophisticated disinformation campaigns. The solution requires education, training, and time. Until the population catches up, we're going to continue to see some very bad choices made by voters while scammers and charlatans will continue to be very successful.
I don't blame people for losing some faith in the American people, but I hope we don't lose faith in democracy because clawing it back after we've given up what few freedoms we still have will not be easy. As long as we have democracy we can still make things better.
In the early 2010s there was a rash of "pranks" in India where people would forward accusations accusing men pictured with children of pedophilia to rile up mobs to assault and kill them. These accusations were basically always false and done to settle scores, basically as a form of stochastic murder. It was bad enough that WhatsApp had to introduce some UX patterns to slow down forwards of accusations and put warning disclaimers on things forwarded too often. (And I'm sure there were other measures around moderation put in on the back end, including collaboration with state law enforcement entities).
Democracy generally operates through a series of institutions that are held accountable to the public, but doesn't directly fly according to every passing whim of the public.
I think given our short lifespans, anything that our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents enjoyed is really easy to perceive as a steady state. Something to take for granted as being invariant. But it’s really not.
While it’s possible to debate the specifics and semantics, this really brought into focus, for me, just how young modern democracy is with a rather unproven durability.
This is all so incredibly young and brittle.
Everything else has a rather more proven record of squandering human potential, of being iniquitous & unjust.
Not my favorite person, but the quip still seems fair:
> Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried. - Winston Churchill
India considers unfettered social media and speech a threat to stability, just like China.
the action of preventing part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censorsh...
Banning the making of bombs is not censorship.
Here are the books "Improvised Munitions Black Book" and "U.S. Army Unconventional Warfare Devices: Boobytraps" from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Improvised-Munitions-Black-Book-Unabr...
Originally created for soldiers in guerrilla warfare situations, this handbook demonstrates the techniques for constructing weapons that are highly effective in the most harrowing of circumstances. Straightforward and incredibly user-friendly, it provides insightful information and step-by-step instructions on how to assemble weapons and explosives from common and readily available materials. Over 600 illustrations complement elaborate explanations of how to improvise any number of munitions from easily accessible resources.
https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Unconventional-Warfare-Devices-Bo...
Some of the materials discussed in this special forces guide to boobytraps include:
- Disguise boobytraps in common items.
- Disguise boobytraps in structures such as window frames and stairways.
- Disguise boobytraps in outdoor areas, in bushes and underground.
- Learn the mechanics of the various types of firing devices, detonators, fuses, cords, adapters, blasting caps, and lighters.
Actually following instructions in these books may lead to felony charges in all 50 states. But writing or reading about them is perfectly legal. The same goes for reading and writing about making scheduled drugs, poisons, and other controlled items.
To steel man you, exporting said books to certain countries is technically illegal under the same law that makes this wikipedia page technically illegal to serve to Iranian IP addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
By that definition the US censors speech such as incitement to violence, fraud, slander, and intellectual property. No place has ever been uncensored.
Like everything in life, there's a matter of degree to it and a question of what is censored.
> most intellectual property law is probably unconstitutional
Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.
I doubt all the Soviet Union and other authoritarian communist regimes censored for decades was hate speech.
Sure, at the moment the left seems to largely align with social liberalism, at least in the west. Maybe authoritarianism is generally more correlated with conservatism, and conservatism with right-wing politics. But left vs. right and authoritarian vs. liberal aren't really the same axis, and it would seem historically quite myopic to think left-wing views somehow confer immunity to abuse of power.
What does that have to do with Modi? Modi's government has moved far to the right.
In modern times these seem to have high correspondences.
Opposition parties are often anti-censorship, pro free speech etc. Once they come into power this all changes and they drift towards authoritarianism.
Western, left-leaning governments have invented the term "hate speech" to justify this behaviour, right-leaning governments would often use "family values".
Restricting hate speech protects the politically vulnerable, the minority, the oppressed. It's not a restriction on hate speech toward the government.
Restricting 'anti-family' speech protects the status quo, those in power, the political majority and oppresses the vulnerable minority. For example, look at the discrimination against LGTBQ people now.
Who said that? It seems fabricated to me, but what do I know? Show us some evidence.
Given the dissolving line between Social media and the Town square, who should be the arbiters of speech on Social media?
A committee appointed from "Interest groups" with all the right "credentials" and "expertise"? Effectively an incestous group with circular pats on the backs.
A separate body elected by the people just for this purpose?
Something else?
There's the idea of forming digital juries to hear cases. http://digitaljuries.com/ In the case of censorship it's less about moderating a person, so I think a more fitting flow would be to have the censor build a small case, say why they think there's an issue, then let a jury vote.
I do think we'd need some meta-moderation of a sort. The jury system itself should be broadly open access, but it needs some checks too.
The only way you get someone to think critically is putting them in a situation where they have to. If you constantly censor and baby them, they won't make better decisions they will make worse ones.
The idea that censorship has to happen in order to protect democracy really fulfills horseshoe theory.
You read a news article. Is it fact? Is it a tilted spin? Is it truth that omits strategic nuances?
No matter how critically I approach it, I will not be able derive objective truth from biased and fuzzy information.
At some point you will need to trust someone to curate.
>No matter how critically I approach it, I will not be able derive objective truth from biased and fuzzy information.
That will always be true no matter the source. There are no truth fairies. There limits of mediums (TV vs Article vs Book vs Movie vs Stream vs etc.) before you even get to individual biases.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punja...
HN seems to have Musk Derangement Syndrome. I have never seen selective outrage aimed at someone to this degree. Everyone on this site seems to turn a blind eye or tolerate to every tech company complying with local laws in foreign countries, but then hold Musk to a much higher standard. He's not allowed to merely be an improvement over his predecessors, he must pass the highest purity tests given to a tech leader, or else he's a lying hypocrite.
This is the actual draft of the press release. Couldnt find the amendment. Its talking about online gaming. Regulations are with respect to content with self harm and betting. There's no appeals process listed but it does not state general fact checking powers. This source is listed twice in the article and online gaming is mentioned right at the beginning.
Is restofwoorld actually something credible (I dont really know) ?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_of_the_Constit...
The Indian constitution (and its amendments) is one of the most liberal and social-justice oriented constitutions of any nation in the world. It was primarily drafted by independent India's most famed social justice proponent: Dr. Ambedkar and the blessings of Gandhi and Nehru, who'd fit right into the sociology departments of academic universities in the US in 2023.
In broad strokes it attempts to empower states with federalism on social issues and governance, but central economic and national policy. It tries to allow social insularity of communities, linguistic or religious. So, religious minorities get to have their own personal civil law (marriage, inheritance) and independent institutions (religious schools, churches, mosques, hospitals, etc) and land ownership. On the other hand, it is paternalistic towards the Indic religions (Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and partially sikhs) taking full ownership (for better or for worse) of issues pertaining to those religions. Similarly, its individual states get a lot of power over how bills are implemented on that ground, meaning that a strong central govt (like Modi's) is still quite weak and can be completely blocked by a uncooperative state govt. (TN, Kerala, WB, Delhi, etc).
India was formed as an insecure nation, desperate to show how secular it was, as a counter weight to Pakistan's religious fundamentalism.
Here are a few accommodations in the constitution that stand out:
* Article 334 [1] of the Indian constitution explicitly grants affirmative action in all govt. institutions to those that belong to lower castes.
* The judiciary is FULLY independent. This means, that unlike the US, the Indian Govt. cannot pick judges, with the judiciary internally handling issues of selecting judges all the way up to the Supreme court. [2]
* The standard fundamental rights. They almost entirely focus on protection of minorities. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-fifth_Amendment_of_the_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_of_India#The_Constit...
If this isn't the definition of doublethink, I don't know what is.
In terms of economics, India will not be in the same league, of course.