Google and Facebook in Delhi Court

Why Google and Facebook were dragged Delhi Court?

The case took off with a private complaint filed by journalist Vinay Rai last December against 21 social networking websites saying that they “create enmity, hatred, and communal violence” and “will corrupt the minds” with “obscene and inflammatory content.” He added that such content was offensive to certain religious communities.

This included illustrations such as, two political icons in compromising positions, pigs running through Islam’s holy city of Mecca and morphed pictures of Hindu Gods and Prophet Mohammad. The punishment for such offenses is to serve several years in jail and financial penalties. The list features, 10 foreign-based companies and websites like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and YouTube.

India being Facebook’s the third-fastest growing market, said that it was impossible to pre-monitor everything and users should be held responsible. In spite of even having a global-policy of non-interference, they had to pull down the objectionable content. Google too said that it’s a constitutional issue of freedom of speech in a democratic India, but had to remove the content on its search engine, YouTube and Blogger.

What my views on the issue are?

India has to play a balancing act during a time when the Internet market is booming resulting in overall development, along with making sure that religious and political sentiments do not get hurt.  Being the world’s largest democracy, it is ironic that it has to resort to censorship and restrict free speech. Having the third largest web user population, the government feels that American standards are not acceptable. They also believe that India, being a socially conservative country with a history of violence between religious groups it is at the best interest of its people.

However these people are not in tune with the psyche of Indian youth, who form the majority of internet users. Youngsters do not consider something that is posted casually online as objectionable content. For most of us it is just humorous or an expression of art. If we find something remotely objectionable, the maximum we will do is show disgust and comment/dislike, then move on to some other web page.

Along with having countless amount of interesting information present, the World Wide Web also has certain content which some people term as “blasphemous”. It is a given. There will be no riots or violence with such material, simply because internet users find it lazy to leave their comfortable chairs and there is far more objectionable content in the mainstream media.

The thinking of youngsters has also changed over the years due to education, globalization and exposure to the foreign world via media, which older generation politicians do not understand. They are trying to catch up with the rising power of world expression and connection and taking this issue far too seriously.

Secondly, the government has chosen to block websites haphazardly and has poor understanding of technical feasibility of censorship. They have taken those websites that are largely popular and dragged them to court. Besides, blocked content is quickly migrated to other websites and users have found a way to dodge filtering, so their efforts have been slightly ineffective.

We will never know if a certain content was being censored by internet websites with the influence of Indian government in the first place. Example: Google was actively filtering posts referring to the malpractices of the government in cases such as Adhar project, UIDAI and World Bank. In future, also we will never know. This action completely blindfolds public’s view on controversial issues of the country.

Yes racial comments, pornography and hate speeches can be censored to an extent, but censoring social networking websites seems ridiculous. There are millions of users in this country and censoring and filtering every single comment, picture, blog post or page by a panel of people is a strenuous task and not to forget expensive. Like we were not paying enough tax, censorship is also bound to make our pockets lighter as the government will need more funds to tackle new concepts of internet technology.

Internet is the only platform that provides people the freedom to publish news and their views to a large spectrum of audience which mainstream news channels/newspapers do not often provide due to TRP reasons. People have a right to information and it cannot be one-sided. The government should be able to tackle malpractices and corruption in the real world and then move towards the virtual one.