India's government is trying to silence US critics | Hacker News Reader

India's government is trying to silence US critics

vox.com

78 pointsneaden49 comments

Over time I suspect India-US relations will be more difficult than China-US relations.

China has a largely separate cultural, media & technology spaces from the US and both are doing as much as they can to disentangle other sectors. So they can be enemies at a distance.

India overlaps in so many ways that it's hard to resolve disputes. Is it okay for YouTube host content that promotes the caste system or Khalistan independence? Should Mastercard to business with Indian banks perform transactions against the spirit of US sanctions?

Anglo internet in for a rude awakening when default English narrative increasingly shifts Indian. Which TBF, no reason it shouldn't. Pretty much only sadists in twitter geopolitics space tries to engage Indian nationalists now. Indian brigade on English reddit also fairly "effective". Maybe immigration driven west will learn blowback of importing diasphora drama not worth it and filter for serenity. IMO India will eventually start their own online ecosystem, they're too big not to. Somewhat related, has anyone noticed youtube cracking down on hindi channels with English titles, use to get tons of them recommended looking up tech dominant in Asia like Xiaomi. Now rarely see any, seems like there's already filtering in place to segregate.

YouTube already censors content considered as "misinformation" by the U.S. government and has worked with the White House to mass delete videos inconvenient to the U.S. Democratic Party or considered dangerous to U.S. sovereignty aka Jan 6 "insurrection" videos that provide non-whitewashed data.

By equal merit, Youtube should have no issues removing content that promotes Khalistan independence or anything the Indian government wants censored. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

I agree and I think this difficulty should be recognized and made so earlier rather than later.

The US should sanction India, it is a better way to go.

This article doesn't help its case by using such an inflammatory title and headings like "India’s plot against America". We all know the clickbait standards of modern media, but good grief that's bad.

We've toned down the title above but if someone who actually reads the article can suggest a more accurate and neutral title, preferably using language from the article itself, we can change it again.

I’m uncomfortable with HN selectively deciding where to use the Article’s headline vs where to editorialize tbh.

The implication here is that $moderator knows better than the journalistic organization publishing this article. Might not be the intention, but it is a fair view on the editing.

>The implication here is that $moderator [or submitter] knows better than the journalistic organization

I think that's exactly the intention, and personally I agree with it. I'm reading this via HN because I like HN's rules and community. I trust them to have better headline judgment than headline writers, on average. Not least because HN has apparently reasonable guidance against clickbait headlines, and many journalistic sources apparently do not, which is not terribly surprising considering the motivating factors involved.

And even if you disagree with a HN title, you'll see the original once you click the link. It's not like it gets changed at the source. It would very quickly be brought up if a source title was significantly changed without reason.

We don't know better, we just have different jobs. Media organizations have headline writers whose job is to sex up the title. Our job is to knock it down to size.

This is in the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." and there's a good 15 years of standard practice here around how to do that. We don't editorialize in the sense of using the title to take a side on the underlying topic; the goal is to be as accurate and neutral as possible, and to use representative language from the article itself ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

You have a good point (we're not experts or particularly qualified, so who do we think we are? it's a fair question!), but it's superseded by a more practical concern: if we didn't do this, HN's front page would be filled with linkbait titles. Since titles are the biggest influence on threads, this would change the character of the site and even make its mandate (intellectual curiosity) impossible. So we try to make it bookish (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), to use pg's old word, and it has long been part of the implicit contract between the site and its readers—so much so that when a linkbait title does show up on the front page, they will complain in the thread about absentee mods and typically flag the submission.

Thanks, this is a fair explanation.

There is of course nothing like India or USA being a single monolithic thought block, so obviously it’s not the whole people of India plotting against USA. Or any set of people against an other one. Nonetheless history is full of governments plotting against each others or at least "putting everything in place just in case", with plebeians given the choice between dying as cannon fodder in remote places or through local public execution thanks to plotted intolerance and incitement to hatred.

Unfortunately at global level it looks like tendencies are favoring nationalistic policies, with ethnocentric and religious hegemony desires making powerful comebacks everywhere.

To my mind looking for scapegoat to blame is certainly not a way to build a better road, but not highlighting symptoms of global political failures is not going to help either.

My guess is that some form of this is fairly common by all countries who have powerful international intelligence apparatus. Doesn’t make it ok or good, and it’s great that journalists highlight the issue to raise awareness. But also important that for anyone who thinks this is bad who is from a world power to understand your country likely does something at least adjacent to this.

The Sweden Democrats recently were found out to have done this:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/swedish-coali...

Made things a bit awkward in the governing coalition.

Makes you wonder how this stuff operates at scale and what the infrastructure of it is like.

> were found out to have done this

A political party running a troll farm is not the same as the intelligence apparatus of a state being used to harass journalists.

The Sweden Democrats have done the same as e.g. the Social Democrats have been doing for a very long time, it is just that the regular media - which has had its focus on the Sweden Democrats for a very long time now - have thus far ignored this. This leaves the 'alternative' media which does report on such things, e.g. Samnytt [1] has a piece on how SAP (which is the full acronym for this party, it stands for 'Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti' - Sweden's social-democratic workers party, the biggest party in the country and the one which has had sole control over Sweden for most of the last century) has spent more than 5 million Swedish kronor (~$500.000) on their own 'troll factories'. Unfortunately those alternative media are just as biased as the regular media but where this is usually ignored for the latter it is used as an excuse to ignore anything published by the former - very convenient for SAP but not that good for the political discourse in Sweden.

[1] https://samnytt.se/socialdemokraterna-har-satsat-over-fem-mi...

I could write shitty articles about the UK all day long and neither me nor my family would ever hear a peep from British Intelligence. Let’s not normalise this.

Let's not pretend the UK state does not abuse its powers to target journalists. Just ask Ernest Moret [1] or Craig Murray [2].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/21/police-watch...

[2] https://www.thenational.scot/news/23864847.craig-murray-deta...

The Moret case is awful but he is a foreign national, and he is an editor and publisher, not simply a journalist.

Craig Murray is not simply (or perhaps really) a journalist; his constant tangles with the intelligence establishment have little to do with his writing and very much more to do with his antagonistic relationship with the British state during his former career:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Murray

I have a lot of time for how he thinks and what he's achieved but he's a campaigner, not a journalist.

The point is reasonable: journalists don't tend to attract individual attention from the intelligence services. Their editors and publishers do, but that is to be expected due to their specific role in publication and is often appropriate; I am quite sure state security apparatus the world over quietly leans on publishers, including in the USA.

I'd believe it as an American, but would like to read a similar article for US threats outside the country. Travel ban / watch list is the main one I'm aware of. Haven't heard about intimidation of family members yet.

I did pull this one up from a Google search: https://fair.org/home/us-censorship-is-increasingly-official... More censorship, than intimidation.

I disagree with this. We have a lot of people dissenting within India. They are not tied down except for counterattacks on social media by people who disagree with them - which to my mind is fair, as both sides are free to (verbally) attack each other - the essence of free speech.

US critics, when they attempt to influence Indian elections, definitely deserve to be slapped down. US (or any other Country) would do similarly. eg. Canada claimed so recently...

They've already done wetwork in Canada, with no consequences. We need to come down on this kind of thing like a ton of bricks, or the wetwork will be next; and if you have nation-states doing wetwork on your territory, you have nothing left.

there is credible evidence that is worth looking at, but its not yet proven or shown to india

India says Canada has offered no evidence it was involved in death of Sikh separatist. India says that Canada has shared no evidence to back up its allegation that the Indian government was involved in the death of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada last year, despite recent arrests in the crime

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/hardee...

I am friends with a couple of documentary filmmakers based in India, and they tell me of some intense censorship of media there, along with other ecological and human rights issues.

The authoritarian turn throughout the world has to be met with its rival. Bog-standard Liberalism will not solve this I fear.

Sampling bias? I know plenty of leftist publications like The Wire, Scroll, News Laundry and even NDTV who are free to express their opinions without censorhip. It's just that the majority of Indians don't ,trust any documentarists anymore (leftist or rightist) because they all push their own agenda.

Given the article's contents, I wanted to add a data-point.

Also anyone who makes news/etc. that does not push an agenda is simply pushing the hegemonic agenda - Modi's, in this case.

That claim that news outlets in general are free to express their opinions without censorship is unfortunately, not really true in practise - most outlets may express opinions but might face sanctions, bans or other forms of censorship, depending on the topic of the opinions. NDTV has faced multiple such actions in the past (one example: https://www.dw.com/en/ridiculous-and-arbitrary-indian-journa...) Another topic with heavy censorship is the ground situation in Kashmir. Social media and internet bans have been common since a long time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Kashmir).

i cant imagine thats the case if the BBC are running in india

The same thing is happening with Israel, but in the case of Israel - most media is too scared to even say this is happening.

The BJP (India) uses the same strategies as the Chinese Communist Party. I love both India and China but I self-censor when talking about either because I do not want to be targeted by the "$0.50 army" (CCP) or the BJP IT cells.

As to attacking America, they India Government murdered and activist in Canada and will kill people in America.

Title feels needlessly inflammatory. Perhaps “Modi’s campaign” might make more sense.

India’s government feels like one the US would usually oppose if not for the fact that India and China are somewhat enemies and thus “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”

A foreign government harasses US citizens living on US soil and calling this out feels needlessly inflammatory to you?

It is common practice to describe the actions of a government in this way. Mostly because what else would "India's campaign" mean?

yeh i thought that its a bit weird, just reads odds

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