India isn’t China

After a Delhi trial court summoned the executives of 21 companies, including Google and Facebook, the Delhi high court responded to their petitions by warning them to take down “objectionable” material, or risk being “blocked” altogether. In Justice Suresh Kait’s words: “You must have a stringent check. Otherwise, like China, we may pass orders banning all such websites.” The government, which was asked to indicate if it agreed with the need for trial (since many of the charges are non-bailable), has also sanctioned the trial. This comes a month after the IT and HRD minister, Kapil Sibal, suggested that social networks “pre-screen” material and weed out anything that runs counter to India’s “community standards”.

The current discourse about social media stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Web works. Unlike professionally vetted newspapers and broadcasters, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, are only intermediaries, much like post offices. They simply provide a platform for billions of people to talk to each other. As in any unfettered human exchange, social norms often clash, and anonymity often brings out the worst in people. Social media simply reflects our own preoccupations — it allows the airing of hate speech and porn and blasphemy, as well as motivational quotes and greeting cards. What is more, apart from letting users flag problematic content, they cannot possibly moderate all interaction themselves, spot the offenders and punish them. Not to mention the near-impossibility

of pin-pointing the objectionable without great collateral damage to free expression — as Saul Bellow memorably put it, “there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”

Of course, incitement to violence, facilitating crime, etc, have legal repercussions whether they happen online or offline. But it is deeply worrying how our free courts and democratic government have invoked China as worthy of emulation. The Chinese government intimidates ISPs and content providers into monitoring material, jails “cyber-dissidents”, and reminds Internet users that they are being watched and could be punished, but it still struggles with proxies and workarounds and Chinese variants of the same services. Apart from the technical challenge of censoring the Web, India, as a vital and mature democracy, should reject the very instinct to do so, because India is not China.