India: Kapil Sibal vs. the Netizens on Filtering Social Media · Global Voices
Sanjukta

Earlier this week, the Indian Union Communications and IT Minister Kapil  Sibal asked Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo to pre-screen derogatory,  defamatory and inflammatory content about political leaders and religion. Mr.  Sibal suggested that the content uploaded by over 100 million Internet users in  India be pre-screened and stopped from going live if found objectionable.
And by ‘screening’ the minister meant manual screening and not screening by  technology.
First it was bad enough that the government should even try to control  people’s voices on the Internet, then to suggest that content uploaded every second  by over 100 million users could be screened by humans and not technology –  Mr Sibal should have known that he was going to face a huge backlash over his  move.
Indian Union Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal. Image from Flickr by World Economic Forum (CC BY-SA).
The mob needed a slogan to run with and political blog Kafila gave them  exactly that. Blogger Shivam Vij on Kafila urged people to raise the slogan “Kapil Sibal is an  Idiot”:
I urge you to write KAPIL SIBAL IS AN IDIOT as your Facebook status  message, use the hashtag #IdiotKapilSibal on Twitter, and write a blog post with  the above title, because there may soon be a day when he may prevent you from  doing so.
What followed was a wave of insult, ridicule and sarcasm thrown at  Mr Sibal  by hundreds and thousands of Internet users in India,  including celebrity  politicians, film personalities, popular bloggers,  authors and millions of  ordinary users. Initially Indian social  media users on Facebook, Twitter and  Google Plus were angry at the  government’s attempt to control their freedom of  expression but they  soon channelized that anger into humour and sarcasm.
Meme's like this was created. Within a day, a Facebook page with that slogan got over 400 likes. Hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets have been floated. Creative  social media users have gone a step ahead and created many humorous images,  videos and jokes.
The Delhi Technological University’s students community blog Indian Fusion wrote that its technically  impossible to pre-screen every content and moreover we don’t need regulations:
The point is that you don’t need to police the Indian Youth. Self-policing or  self-regulation is already working well. For eg on facebook, when someone posts  a abusive content related to some god, then people immediately starts reporting  it as abuse and if facebook finds it offensive it removes it as soon as  possible. So this self-regulation is already existing which is  enough.
A right to ‘self regulation’ and the freedom to chose our own definition of  ‘objectionable content’ and then decide when and how to respond to what we think  is objectionable, whether to complaint or ignore – has been a  common opinion amongst all the reactions that have come from various net  users.
Harsht  writes:
As ordinary users, what do we do when we find something objectionable on  Facebook, Twitter or anywhere on the Internet! We report it to the platform  provider. Most popular platform providers have such mechanisms.
Indian  Liberals blogged:
People have all the freedom to feel offended but they don’t have the right to  regulate others from saying what they want to say. Their freedom to get offended  ends where others’ freedom of expression begins.  Period.
Another common reaction is to compare this incident to the level of freedom  of speech and expressions or the lack of it in our neighbouring countries like  Pakistan and China. People are angry and ashamed that an Indian politician  attempted to tarnish the image of the democratic India that the youth is  presumably so proud of.
Blogger Vidyut wrote on  AamJanata:
Politicians have no shame, they say, but people do. To me it is shameful that  a leader of my country made such a mockery of free speech and attempted to bully  organizations into censorship, so the name of my country has that tarnish  associated with it.
In light humor, blogger Giribala Joshi paid  a satirical: “tribute to the upholder of communal harmony and  decency in the Indian society, respected Shri Shri Kapil Sibal Ji.” Also a poem parodied one of Kapil Sibal’s poem:
Unknown Content
Unknown content
It beckons us
We must  just
Censor it.
Blogger  Bharat C Jain like many others points towards the political undertone to a  matter that otherwise appears an information technology subject, and says that  such pre-screening would have been acceptable had it only been for national  security.
Sibal's directive would have been alright if it were directed in the context  of our national interest and the country's security – like anything  anti-national and spreading of hate content.
Lakshmi  Chaudhry writes on First Post:
Kapil Sibal may be an idiot — or not — but more importantly, he represents  the feudal mentality of the broader political class, which is in turn enabled by  the multinational companies — all in the guise of protecting our cultural  sensibilities.
Amidst all the anger and humor some very serious concerns regarding  ‘private censorship regime’ have been raised by the Centre for Internet Society.  Legally  India reports:
CIS has carried out an undercover investigation into the “chilling effects”  of new information technology laws on freedom of expression online, with six out  of seven major websites removing innocent content online without proper  investigation, creating a “private censorship regime”.
This is not the first time that the Indian Government has tried to control  free speech on Internet, back in 2006 a number of BlogSpot sites were  blocked by a Government order leading to a fury  amongst the bloggers. The present move by Mr Sibal has put the focus back on  several such attempts by the Government on a regular basis.
The Times of India reported:
Google has received government requests for removal of 358 items from its  services, including YouTube and Orkut,  during the January-June period, according to a report by the internet search  giant. As many as 255 item removal requests cited the government criticism as  the reason, said the Google Transparency Report. The government had asked Google  to remove 236 items from Orkut and 19 items  from YouTube for the same reason, it added.
Lawyer and researcher Pranesh Prakash has written an extensively researched  piece on why “Online  Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical.”
While nobody can possibly deny that any attempt to censor innocent free  speech is unacceptable, some citizens have objected, and rightly so, to the way  social media users reacted.
I wrote on  Samyukta media’s blog:
If a certain move by the Government is unacceptable the citizens must raise  their voices against it, but the voices should be civilized, ethical, logical  and rational even when the medium is internet. If social media voices and  citizen journalism is to be taken seriously the users must show the same  maturity and responsibility as traditional media players and professional  journalists.
On the same lines Navin Kabra wrote:
Do I agree with Kapil Sibal? Of course not. Pre-screen is neither possible,  nor desirable. But I’m willing to bet that Kapil Sibal already knew both those  things. My point is, saying we should oppose this is not the same as saying  Kapil Sibal is an idiot.
As the matter would eventually subside what would remain a valid concern is  in this largest democracy of the world, how do we create a balance between what  is ‘our offence versus what is their offence’, the rights of minorities versus  might of majority, the rights versus the responsibilities and the  last but not  the least, the unapologetic mob mentality of the online citizen journalists  versus the controlled mainstream media reporting.