-The Hindu ‘Issue is not of use of social media, it is of abuse and misuse of social media’. Union Communications and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Thursday that climate activist Disha Ravi’s arrest was based on law and order and it is under judicial process. He added that the House should consider “should some people abuse social media internationally to defame India to promote secessionism.” Replying to a question...
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The New IT Rules Are a Hodgepodge of Hamfisted Regulations -Jawhar Sircar
-TheWire.in This new government oversight for streaming service content and online digital news is, put simply, an overkill. Recent media reports note that the Supreme Court has observed that the new OTT (over the top technology) rules have no teeth, going on to add that some platforms even show pornography in the absence of effective oversight. It has, therefore, directed the government to present rules that are more effective. One expected that the Indian...
More »Centre’s IT Rules bring answerability in digital ecosystem. But they also increase political control -Apar Gupta
-The Indian Express Apar Gupta writes: The substance of many of the requirements were never put to public consultation or deliberation by experts. This is particularly the case for the regulations for online news portals and video streaming platforms. In the polarised environment that we now inhabit, there are few public agreements. One of these rare instances is an agreement that social media is broken. For many commentators, this is an area...
More »Fuzzy law, unclear jurisprudence, trampled rights -Gautam Bhatia
-The Hindu The legal regime that enables the government to block websites needs urgent reform On February 1, 2021, in the wake of the intensification of the farmers’ protests and reports of violent incidents on January 26 – a number of Twitter accounts became inaccessible in India. These included (among many others) the accounts of The Caravan magazine, the actor Sushant Singh, and the Kisan Ekta Morcha handle, which was chronicling the...
More »Twitter block to road spikes and a train diversion: bid to deter stir -Karishma Mehrotra and Sukrita Baruah
-The Indian Express On Monday, around 100 Twitter accounts and 150 tweets related to the farmers’ protests went off the microblogging platform as the IT Ministry directed Twitter to remove these accounts under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. From a temporary freeze on over 100 Twitter accounts seen as sympathetic to the farm protests to embedding spikes on roads, from diverting a Delhi-bound train to extending the internet ban in...
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