14 Nov 2013 | Events, United Kingdom
In light of the recently passed Californian law allowing minors to delete any of their online activity, Index organised a Google Hangout in association with student newspapers York Vision and The Student Journals, on whether young people should have the right to be forgotten on social media.
Watch the discussion between York Vision editor Patrick Greenfield, Student Journals editor Amy Ashenden and Index’ Alice Kirkland and Milana Knezevic below.
What do you think? Have your say in the comments or tweet us at @IndexCensorship.
7 Oct 2013 | Digital Freedom, India, News and features, Politics and Society
Illustration: Shutterstock
India’s National Integration Council met in the last week of September 2013 to discuss the threat of communal violence in the country. The council, first set up in the early 1960s, gives senior Indian politicians and public leaders a platform to discuss issues that could divide the country along caste, communal, language and regional fault lines. This September, with the backdrop of violent communal clashes that have seen over 50 killed and 40,000 displaced in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sat with some of the Chief Ministers, to discuss how to resolve these issues.
There were early reports that the meeting was going to discuss the ‘misuse’ of social media, as news reports have indicated that the violent clashes in Uttar Pradesh were spurred on by false videos on YouTube. In India, the regulation of social media has been a subject of great controversy. The government has, in the past, used the IT Act’s Section 66(A) to arrest people for irresponsible posts that they claimed could cause ‘communal tension’. However, as the famous case of the Palghar girls demonstrated, many early arrests under this Section were politically motivated. Similarly, while the government has in the past asked social media companies to take down controversial posts, it has been revealed that most of the requests were again to take down criticism against the government.
However, at the same time, social media and MMS (multimedia messages through texts) have indeed been known to cause real damage. Last year, false rumours spread through MMS resulted in the exodus of northeastern migrants from south India, as the threat of violence seemed imminent. At the time, the government had to ban bulk text messaging, and ultimately restricted messages to 5 a day to curb any more rumours. Meanwhile, with global violence in the aftermath of the YouTube video, The Innocence of Muslims, the government of Jammu and Kashmir decided to suspend the internet for a few days to prevent any incidents.
Only about 164.81 million Indians have access to the internet, and only 143.20 million over mobile phones according to official figures released by the Telecom and Regulatory Authority of India in March 2013. Given this scenario, both the reach in terms of positive and negative impact, is still quite limited in India.
The prime minister, however, chose to focus on social media’s role on fanning communal violence in his address at the National Integration Council. His views on hate speech on social media were echoed by many others, including Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren, Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma. The majority of chief ministers, then, favour social media regulation. Ideas thrown forward included taking action within the current legal framework, setting up ‘social media laboratories’ to monitor posts under intelligence departments and even mobilizing NGOs and prominent citizens to counter social media rumours.
There are a few important points to keep in mind while looking at this debate: the real need for regulating social media, scapegoating by politicians and finally, preserving freedom of expression and an open internet.
Given India’s experience with hate speech online, and reports about gender targeted abuse, along with abuse based on political, caste, community and regional affiliation, there is a valid point raised for some kind of regulation of social media. However, the real question is the kind of regulation India chooses to favor. In China, a new law can charge people with defamation if a false rumor started by them gets reposted over 500 times. In India, current laws allow citizens to go to court over information that has even caused them “annoyance” under Section 66A of the law. To ensure this is not abused, the government has now mandated that a senior police officer looks at individual cases before allowing charges to be filed to avoid nuisance cases. In the aftermath of the Muzzafarnagar riots of Uttar Pradesh, some citizens are urging the National Human Rights Commission to ask the Department of Telecom to screen and remove inflammatory posts on social media. However, when looking at cases where mass impact can cause damage (such as the exodus of northeasterns from south India), the government relied immediately on technology to solve the problem. The same can be said of the Jammu and Kashmir government, which switched off the internet, at the slightest hint of trouble.
However, both responses need to have legal sanctity. We already know the Indian government monitors its citizens’ communications, and much like many other governments across the world, and the legal basis for these programmes are still dubious. The government may want to come up with a plan for targeted control of certain communication channels should a particularly disastrous video or message surface over social media, and clearly contributes to an inflamed environment and damage on the ground. Social media is already being used to recruit terrorists. Perhaps some communication channels will be used to organize riots, as have been seen before in London. These will become bigger concerns when more than a sliver of India is connected to the internet. The debate will undoubtedly be seen through the prism of security instead of the freedom of expression, as we are currently witnessing the world over.
In a predominantly uneducated country, rumours run rife, and the result is not violence alone. For example, in 2006, polio campaigns in India have failed in Muslim communities, because of rampant rumours that the polio campaigns were a method to sterilize the community. In 2008, despite warnings, rumours that an apparition of the Virgin Mary would appear to devotees after staring into the sun caused dozens to go blind. Earlier in June 2013, three men were lynched to death in the state of Assam because of a rumour that a group of “naked men” were raping women. This does not mean every misguided or even damaging video needs to be censored immediately.
The constitution of India allows for freedom of expression, although with restrictions. However, any plan to take reasonable action in light of clear and present danger, should be drawn up with the help of civil society organizations and lawyers, and cannot be made and implemented unilaterally. The potential for abuse is too great.
Unfortunately, as it seems today – social media has become become the target of scapegoating by politicians. For example, the violence in Uttar Pradesh may or may not have been caused/spurred by a YouTube video. There is no empirical evidence for that. What isclear is that the Muzzafarnagar riots started with two Hindu boys stabbing a Muslim youth because he stalked their sister. Not YouTube. However, it would appear that instead of focusing on other causes of communal tensions in a neighbourhood, which include poverty, development, and unemployment, senior politicians vilified social media.
With elections looming, can one guarantee that any gap in planning, law and order management or inflammatory campaign speeches won’t be blamed on a tweet or Facebook update? Will the outward calling for “regulating social media” will substitute for real change on the ground?
Finally, the most important point remains. Hate speech, law and order, and mass panic are realities India’s states have been living with for years. It would appear that, in dealing with free expression on the internet, India’s politicians seem to err on the side of control. Perhaps the next election is not just about the economy, but equally about the Indian citizens freedom of expression and freedom from control.
This article was originally published on 7 Oct 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
24 Sep 2013 | Campaigns, Events, United Kingdom
The possible consequences of using social media should be taught to children as young as 10, although who should be responsible for doing so is still unclear. This was one conclusion from “Speak now: Regret Later?”, a Social Media Week event where as a specialist panel discussed how young people represent themselves online and what implications this may have on their future employability options.
A collaboration between Index on Censorship, The Student Journals and Youth Media Agency, the discussion was chaired by Index CEO Kirsty Hughes, with Asa Bennett, Huffington Post business reporter, Maya Wolfe-Robinson, commissioning editor on Guardian law and Comment is Free, and Siraj Datoo, co-founder of The Student Journals, making up the panel.
The majority of the audience who engaged in the discussion, all under the age of 25, felt they had evolved with the changes in social media and adapted their privacy settings and self-censored accordingly. This quickly lead the debate on the floor to progress to the question of the next generation of social media users; how should they be taught about the possible implications of what they post online and whose responsibility it should be to do this.
“Older people need to have an understanding of social media so that they can properly teach young people how to use it effectively,” commented Datoo, who admitted his own father had a Facebook account but no idea how to use it. He urged that it should be a collective engagement by all of those in contact with children to make them aware of the possible risks they take in using social media.
However, a comment from the floor argued that it should be the responsibility of parents – those buying their children the tablets, laptops and mobile phones on which they have access to social media – to educate them on how they could jeopardise future employment possibilities from what they share online.
One observation made was greeted with nods from around the room; how to use social media safely and without repercussions should be taught alongside sexual education in primary schools. Despite Facebook setting a minimum age of 13, a report by the London School of Economics found that almost half of all British children aged 9 to 12 are using social media networking sites. Many of these users do not take on board that the internet lasts forever- even some of the audience themselves were shocked to hear that Facebook and Snapchat, an app used to send images that supposedly dissolve from the screen after a set time, own and keep all photos posted or sent by their users.
“My heart bleeds for this generation growing up with their baby photos being posted online by their parents; they are born digital and the rest of their lives will be documented across social media,” said Wolfe-Robinson, with agreement from the panel that employers should take this into account in the future. “I fully support the idea for a right to be forgotten, for us not to be judged on comments we made in our youth, but I understand this is probably an unrealistic expectation.”
5 Sep 2013 | Comment, News and features, United Kingdom
A troll, yesterday
Law firm Schillings has relaunched as a privacy and cyber security firm, the Lawyer reports.
Schillings, scourge of many a Fleet Street editor, clearly believes the future of libel and privacy lays online. As such, they have co-opted online security firm “Vigilante Bespoke” into “Schillings IT Security”.
Vigilante Bespoke (which wouldn’t be a bad rapper name) started in 2009 as an “ethical hacking” business, testing gaps in firms and individual’s technological security.
Now, Vigilante Bespoke founder Oliver Crofton is being cast by Schillings as the Trollhunter General. He explains on the Schillings site:
“Although the internet is seen by some as anonymous, everything we do online leaves a “digital fingerprint”, which in some instances can be traced to uncover valuable identifying information.
“During investigations we look to uncover IP addresses (these are unique codes that relate to an individual home or office internet connection), which can often lead us to the street address of the person posting the nasty comments. In some instances, website server connection logs can be analysed, which can give us the mac address (a computer’s name and location) of the computer being used to post the unsolicited content.
“Simple tools also help when tracing people online, such as indepth online searches for usernames; as these are often used across several websites and each website may vary in the amount of information available about their users.”
Apart from troll hunting, the Schillings site has lots more to say on social media: what does a company do, for example, when compromising pictures of senior figures are Instagrammed (“the Weiner Dilemma” perhaps?). How to deal with negative customer reviews on say, TripAdvisor, or how to handle an ex-employee who can’t stop ranting about your company online?
The Schillings site is, in its own way, an indicator of where the new libel and privacy battles will be fought. It’s not about newspapers any more.
(ht Leah Borromeo)
