THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

By January, the government told the Supreme Court on Monday, October 28, it will have prepared a final draft of its proposed rules and regulations for social media. According to the ministry of electronics and information technology, while the internet has been an important asset to economic growth, it has also “emerged as a potent tool to cause unimaginable disruption to the democratic polity”. According to the government, the spreading of fake news, hate speech and anti-national messages on social media is a threat to “individual rights and the nation’s integrity, sovereignty and security”. The Indian government is not alone in its attempts to regulate social media companies. Nigeria recently announced plans to control social media, using many of the same arguments. There is no question that social media behemoths don’t do enough to control both fake news and hate speech, and that their processes are opaque. But do we trust our government not to violate our rights to free speech as they seek to regulate social media? Since 2009, when such information was tabulated, the Indian government has led the world in asking for content to be removed online, with over 90 per cent of its nearly 78,000 requests, about a fifth of the global total, directed at Facebook. The latter also owns WhatsApp, which has been blamed for enabling widespread rumour-mongering in India, leading even to mob and vigilante ‘justice’. But arguably the attempt by our governments to muzzle free speech is an even greater threat to democracy. ■