India strengthens its control of social media
Platforms now have 36 hours to delete a message deemed illegal (illustration).
REUTERS - Dado Ruvic
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
The Indian government released a new Internet regulation code on Thursday.
The stated goal is to protect users, but civil society fears mass censorship and surveillance.
Publicity
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It had been ten years since the Information Technology Code was overhauled in India.
It has been done since Thursday, February 25, with a new version intended to fight against false information and ensure the security of the State.
The law provides that any message considered illegal be removed within 36 hours by social networks, online streaming services and digital news services.
The platforms will also have 72 hours to help the authorities identify the author of the content, specifies our correspondent in Bangalore,
Côme Bastin
.
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To read also: Anger of farmers in India: a message from Rihanna ignites Twitter
"
These very short deadlines are a problem because we have often seen authorities overreact on messages and attack users without sufficient legal basis
,"
warns Apar Gupta, director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, an organization that defends privacy on Internet.
The second problem is that this text will delete the encrypted messages.
This means that the information will be able to have access to all your exchanges on platforms such as WhatsApp or Signal.
India is moving closer to a Chinese-style rather than democratic surveillance model.
"
Under the new rules, social media will also need to appoint a compliance officer and a “
complaints officer
”, both based in India.
At the same time, a "
self-regulatory body
" headed by a government-appointed official will have the authority to warn or censor a platform, force it to apologize or include a "
warning
" or "
clause. disclaimer
”regarding content.
For the Ministry of Information and Communication, this code will allow millions of users to be protected from the abusive use of social networks.
But civil society is all the more worried as the Indian government regularly resorts to shutting down internet access, as was the case at the sites of farmers' protests, to limit information sharing during the unrest. .
More than 1,500 Twitter accounts were closed and a student was arrested for simple hashtags supporting farmers.
India is ranked 142nd out of 180 countries in the 2020 world press freedom ranking compiled by Reporters Without Borders.
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