“Momma tweet, Poppa sweet, and their family full of tweetle bums”, is an incredibly catchy nursery rhyme we may remember. However, we may never have realised that such sweet tweets can land us in big trouble.
A controversy seems to be brewing on and with twitter. That an opposition party is accused of posting material critical of the government, that a spokesperson of the government challenging it, the opposition party claiming the spokesperson’s stand as fabricated and even filing a police complaint and twitter, the ‘microblogging’ cite precipitating a fight by flagging the spokesperson’s stand as ‘manipulated’ are all prime points in an evolving script. Who then is right of the three concerned parties?
These are times when all efforts must be made to contain Covid and provide relief to the harassed and hard-pressed masses. Both Gurgaon and Delhi are in a lockdown mode. Our External Affairs Minister is visiting USA in search of some very important outcomes. Both Centre and the States are talking to US companies for vaccine procurement. We are in the midst of a devastating pandemic. The foreign press is crying hoarse that we are dropping in the freedom index, the free press index and even the FDI confidence index. Was this then the appropriate moment for the raids or attract more international media attention?
Statista, a popular Business Data Platform, reports, US leading with 69.3 million twitter users, followed by Japan with 50.9 and India with 17.5 million users as of January 2021. Besides, UK, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, France, Philippines, Spain and Thailand in that order have rapidly falling number of users on Twitter, with the last said logging 70 lakh users. Rest of the countries do not even matter to be mentioned. When officials claim more followers for some of our top leaders than the number of followers they have, what does it mean?
Of course, there are several normal ways to raise number of followers. One can share relevant information, post visual content, tweet consistently, interact with others, count on micro-influencers, talk up a twitter presence on other channels and run followers’ campaigns. Though the twitter policies forbid, there are yet some who operate fake accounts, artificially amplify by account metric inflation or use popular hashtags or even run specific bots.
Even then the Twitter user base in India is just 1% of the population. Most, even in big cities, do not know what twitter does or what it is. What then is the pride quotient? When a political leader or a film star is blocked or flagged for unethical activity, the electronic media goes to town. For the alleged perpetrators, it is like an ego trip. Is it media hype or media bashing that we are witnessing? What is the hullabaloo or commotion about? Have we not forgotten the main issue of Covid management in this milieu?
Twitter allows one to send and receive short posts called tweets. Twitter users follow other users on Twitter. If one follows someone, he/she can see their tweets in their twitter ‘timeline’, the idea being one of following people and organisations with similar academic and personal interests. In practice However, it roughly translates to “social pastime”. People who otherwise have time aplenty and want to be here, there, and everywhere, those who’s bruised egos get a fillip by indulging in small talk, or those who are itching for a fight to spend time, religiously follow people and tweet to their hearts content. What possible TRP rise would a media channel achieve by tweeting so called “Breaking news” second after second? Why should a user check it out on twitter and react? Are foreigners or NRI’s really interested in these tweets? Can they really manipulate the content and intent to pose a real threat to the social harmony unless there are motivated local networks who do it for them?
During a recent press conference, the IT Ministry revealed that WhatsApp has over 53 crores users, YouTube has over 44.8 crores users, Facebook 41 crores and Instagram has 21 crores. Fake news routinely masquerades as authentic news on all these platforms. Don’t group chats manufacture threats and injustices out of thin air? Participants in the group then target others having contrary views and before long we find bitter fights. The more righteous among them quit. New enemies and new friends form in a few minutes. The self-hypnotism is complete and we start accepting the erroneous myths as truth.
The new IT rules notified by the government seem to be taking on privacy issues so much so that “WhatsApp” has moved the Delhi High Court on 25th May seeking a stay. Most contentious of the rules require instant messaging platforms to aid in identifying the ‘originator’ of messages, which means that WhatsApp like messaging applications will be required to ‘trace’ all chats henceforth. This is akin to keeping a fingerprint of every single message sent, which would break end-to-end encryption. More importantly, does it not undermine people’s right to privacy? Doesn’t freedom of speech support freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction? Such protection is even enshrined within our constitution. It certainly does not mean that one can abuse others or can use it to overthrow governments.
Common limitations to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, and the like. Would they be any different from what they are, if they did not involve the government or the political leaders? Will it cease to be libel or slander if two individuals on the chat group complain? Will pornography become any less offensive if traded in a group and does not involve the government? Each attribute needs to be proved if the new rules are to be implemented. Technically, everyone on WhatsApp groups can be hauled up if end-to-end encryption were to go, for 90% of the messages except the most docile ones like “Good Morning” or “Good Night”, would qualify to be either libel, slander or incitement. Besides, are our Police and Courts equipped to handle the load of new entrants to crime? If no one finds value in these platforms, why not ban them and run campaigns to denounce their use? Why allow them and then throttle? Obviously, they cannot be expected to be government spokespersons.