Is censorship the only answer?
“How India tamed Twitter,” ran the headline over an article in the Washington Post recently, going on mention that India had “set a global standard for online censorship.” (Article here.)
One can imagine much rejoicing over news that Twitter (or X—a favorite target of media critics), has been tamed by someone. But maybe not so much over the “global standard” for censorship.
Censorship is routine in India, lately under laws giving authorities the power to completely block platforms that resist, and even arrest local employees on criminal charges. Over 6,000 social media posts were taken down by government order in 2022 alone. In that year, Twitter stopped reporting the number of accounts blocked by official demand, but in the previous year it was just under 1,400.
“There are certain accounts that continue to spew venom,” a retired ministry official says. “I have to go by what content you have posted, how much of it is anti-India.”
Similar to “un-American”, “anti-India” often means “critical of the government”, or of the party in power, or the prime minister.
When opposition leader Rahul Gandhi accused the prime minister of failing to distribute vaccines and shedding insincere “crocodile tears” about pandemic deaths, the speech set off a flood of anti-Modi and anti-government tweets with the hashtag “#crocodiletears”. In New Delhi, officials ordered Twitter to remove all posts with that hashtag and demanded that the company hand over information identifying users who tweeted it . . .
The threat of arrest “shifts the calculus significantly” for corporate decision-making, said Waghre, of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “You can draw a line in the sand from when the IT rules 2021 went into effect. There was a sudden drop in reported instances of any sort of pushback.” . . .
One former IT Ministry official praised the [tech] companies for becoming more “understanding” of the government’s perspective, noting that they increasingly comply with its orders.
That’s chilling.
In the US, we claim to cherish our Bill of Rights, in particular the right to free expression. Recall the movie Field of Dreams, and the scene during a meeting in a high school gym, where Annie Kinsella stands up to rebut a woman who proposes book banning. “Let’s have a vote! Who’s for Eva Braun here?” (If you don’t get the reference, see Wikipedia.) “Who thinks that we have to stand up to the kind of censorship they had under Stalin?”
An uplifting scene. Until recently, free expression didn’t seem all that dangerous, at least in democracies. Censorship was a dirty word.
In India, mob violence has been a distinctive part of its history. Riots and pitched battles, mass killings, torture, the burning of villages—not to mention the economic chaos that swirls around civil unrest. And Indian governments have become increasingly autocratic in dealing with it.
Public expression has been forcibly reined in. And, arguably, the result has been progress, economically and socially, if not politically. Still, India remains a democracy, in form at least.
Meanwhile in the US, with its strong protections over speech, political divisions relentlessly deepen, with breakouts of violence, some random, some not so random. People fret over the future of democracy.
In ‘the good old days’, when America stood as the undisputed leader of the ‘free world’, its power rested on a triad of economic growth, military strength, and governance. The governance leg seems to be buckling: Government shutdowns. Congressional stand-offs. A Supreme Court bent on ideological crusades. Politicians promoting domestic violence, and followers flocking to their rallies.
And unfettered social media plays a conspicuous role.
Before the Internet, ideas were spread to mass audiences through publishers and broadcasters. Books and magazines and news shows were expensive to produce, thus content was vetted. The Internet did away with these gatekeepers, liberal and conservative. The gatekeepers had held a de facto leash on expression, and the good fight seemed to be to give a voice to everyone.
Interviewer: Tell me what you think your greatest weakness is.
Job Applicant: I would have to say my honesty. I’m completely honest with everyone.
Interviewer: Well, that doesn’t sound like a weakness to me! I really think honesty is a great strength.
Applicant: Well, I honestly don’t give a shit what you think.
— A very old joke.
Completely free expression now seems a lot like complete honesty. Corrosive. And we have seen the result, from death threats against election officials to government paralysis to mob violence. Trump and his cohort aren’t the ultimate cause; they are merely opportunists. Any batch of opportunists would do.
It seems harder each year to draw a line between political speech, which nearly everyone would agree should be protected, and raw incitement. And we have seen demonstrated, if we needed demonstrating, that the psychology of incitement is not to build, but to smash.
There is a lot to smash in our world, and piles of armament to do the smashing with. Not to mention that, if democratic governance disintegrates, America’s military and economic engines, the other legs of that tottering triad, might themselves become overwhelming engines of chaos.
The anti-democratic forces of corporate publishers and broadcasters, and media elitism, never undermined democratic governance in the way that radical populism and unfettered expression do. On the contrary, it looks as if those forces provided the restraint that made democracy work.
At least the country was once governable without government censorship.
Is that still possible? I have no idea. But it’s a pretty grim situation if the alternative to censorship is chaos.
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