15 Oct 24 | India, News and features, Volume 53.03 Autumn 2024
We knew it was coming. It was 28 November 2021, and I was meeting my friend Ravish for the first time in nearly 20 months.
Because of Covid I had been working from home since March 2020; a home that was 660km away from Delhi.
It was a smoggy winter, as is usually the case in Delhi, but that day was a bright sunny one. We walked along Lodhi Road, and at one point in our conversation Ravish turned to me and said with a grim smile: “Don’t worry. When NDTV shuts down, we will set up a YouTube channel.”
Such comments were not new for him, but this was the first time Ravish had spoken of what would happen after our jobs had gone.
I would always brush away such fearful forecasts, and I disregarded this one until August 2022, when NDTV was taken over by billionaire Gautam Adani.
In November of that year – almost exactly a year after that winter afternoon on Lodhi Road, as the takeover neared completion – Ravish quit. The YouTube channel that we run today – Ravish Kumar Official – became operational with the release of his resignation episode.
The response at the time was overwhelming.
In the first month, more than 2.75 million people subscribed to the channel. Ravish and I never formally sat down to discuss working together. I was far more clueless than I had ever been but also sure of the fact that, for a variety of reasons, I was part of something momentous. And I knew I wanted to be here.
My first experience of the editorial independence we had bought for ourselves came two months after we started.
In January 2023, US financial forensic investigators Hindenburg Research issued a critical report on Adani’s companies, which led to a collapse in stock prices.
Throughout the next few days, we regularly reported on the story on our channel, and realised that we were on different turf now. We did not have the resources of a TV station. We had no network of journalists to rely on. We could not afford lights and live transmission systems. We struggled with visuals as everything was copyrighted. We were a small team of four yet, somehow, we managed.
It has been 20 months since Ravish’s resignation. In that time, I have found greater confidence in myself as a journalist. My political sense has evolved and my writing has improved. I can produce and edit very quickly and can create compelling reports on the most meagre of resources.
I have started my own series called Vox Vrinda, but it has not been an easy ride. After five years of working under the regime in India, I now know that censorship works in insidious ways.
It is not just about the jailing of a journalist. It is also about making their life and livelihood so precarious that they question their choices every waking moment.
Every other day, Ravish and I talk about what will happen when this channel is taken down. As a young female journalist, I do not know what my future looks like in this profession. The powers that govern my life and want to control my voice have received electoral shocks, but they are as vicious as ever.
It is true that my experience as a journalist is informed by the very stifling political environment that I am in – but it has also been about finding my way and my voice by knocking my knees and elbows against all that comes my way.
I know the path ahead is not an easy walk, but I have good shoes on.
06 Jun 19 | Campaigns -- Featured, Digital Freedom, Digital Freedom Statements, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Social media platforms have enormous influence over what we see and how we see it.
We should all be concerned about the knee-jerk actions taken by the platforms to limit legal speech and approach with extreme caution any solutions that suggest it’s somehow easy to eliminate only “bad” speech.
Those supporting the removal of videos that “justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status” might want to pause to consider that it isn’t just content about conspiracy theories or white supremacy that will be removed.
In the wake of YouTube’s announcement on Wednesday 5 June, independent journalist Ford Fischer tweeted that some of his videos, which report on activism and extremism, had been flagged by the service for violations. Teacher Scott Allsopp had his channel featuring hundreds of historical clips deleted for breaching the rules that ban hate speech, though it was later restored with some videos still flagged.
It’s not just Google’s YouTube that has tripped over the inconsistent policing of speech online.
Twitter has removed tweets for violating its community standards as in the case of US high school teacher and activist Carolyn Wysinger, whose post in response to actor Liam Neeson saying he’d roamed the streets hunting for black men to harm, was deleted by the platform. “White men are so fragile,” the post read, “and the mere presence of a black person challenges every single thing in them.”
In the UK, gender critical feminists who have quoted academic research on sex and gender identity have had their Twitter accounts suspended for breaching the organisation’s hateful conduct policy, while threats of violence towards women often go unpunished.
Facebook, too, has suspended the pages of organisations that have posted about racist behaviours.
If we are to ensure that all our speech is protected, including speech that calls out others for engaging in hateful conduct, then social media companies’ policies and procedures need to be clear, accountable and non-partisan. Any decisions to limit content should be taken by, and tested by, human beings. Algorithms simply cannot parse the context and nuance sufficiently to distinguish, say, racist speech from anti-racist speech.
We need to tread carefully. While an individual who incites violence towards others should not (and does not) enjoy the protection of the law, on any platform, or on any kind of media, tackling those who advocate hate cannot be solved by simply banning them.
In the drive to stem the tide of hateful speech online, we should not rush to welcome an ever-widening definition of speech to be banned by social media.
This means we – as users – might have to tolerate conspiracy theories, the offensive and the idiotic, as long as it does not incite violence. That doesn’t mean we can’t challenge them. And we should.
But the ability to express contrary points of view, to call out racism, to demand retraction and to highlight obvious hypocrisy depend on the ability to freely share information.[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1560160119940-326df768-f230-4″ taxonomies=”4883″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
07 Mar 19 | Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Responding to calls from politicians for founder of the far-right English Defense League Tommy Robinson’s videos to be removed from YouTube, Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship said:
“Tommy Robinson is a vile bigot but this level of government intervention on what is and is not acceptable speech should make us all worried. Investigation into whether something is a crime – and prosecution of it – is what we have an independent police force and judiciary for.
“If Robinson has broken the law (threatening/inciting violence, engaging in intimidatory behaviour) he should be investigated and prosecuted accordingly. We have plenty of laws that can deal with this.
“Politicians should not be leaning on anyone to enforce the law – forcing social media companies to act as law enforcers without any due legal process undermines fundamental principles of democracy.”[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1551968738540-b660aa54-ea07-4″ taxonomies=”6534″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
14 May 18 | Artistic Freedom, Media Freedom, News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”100332″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]All that is solid in the Turkish media melted into air over the past year, and much of the entertainment content has migrated from traditional platforms to streaming services like YouTube and Netflix.
Turkey’s watchdogs took notice. In March parliament passed a law that expands the powers of Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), including blocking internet broadcasts. With the new law the state hopes to have some degree of control over online content that it considers dangerous.
This spring, many bulwarks of Turkish media have shape-shifted. In April, Turkey’s biggest media conglomerate, Doğan, changed hands. Foreign media titles with Turkish editions, including the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Al Jazeera, have already pulled out of the Turkish market. Newspaper circulations saw sharp decline.
Meanwhile online streaming services have thrived. Spotify entered Turkey in 2013 and pushed its premium service with a Vodafone deal two years later. On Twitter, BBC’s Turkish service has just short of three million followers. Netflix introduced its Turkish service in 2016. Last year it too signed a deal with Vodafone, and Netflix Turkey pushed its products aggressively, with posters of House of Cards plastered in Istanbul’s subway stations.
Statista, an online statistics website, predicts there will be approximately 397.4 thousand active streaming subscribers to Netflix in Turkey in 2019.
Turkish-owned streaming services also came to the fore. In 2012 Doğuş Media Group launched its video on demand service, puhutv, and there was excitement last year when the channel showed its first series, Fi, based on a best-selling trilogy by Turkish author Azra Kohen. The series quickly became a sensation, largely thanks to scenes featuring nudity and racy sexual encounters.
Puhutv is a free, ad-supported service and watching Fi on Puhutv meant seeing many ads of condoms, dark chocolates and other products linked with pleasure. In just three days, the pilot episode of Fi was viewed more than four and a half million times.
For content producers the Turkish love for the internet means new opportunities for profit. In February a report by Interpress found that the number of internet users increased by 13 percent to 51 million from the past year. Turkey is one of the largest markets for social media networks and it ranks among the top five countries with largest Facebook country populations.
The RTÜK watchdog, which now has great control over streaming services, normally chases television broadcasters. It famously went after popular TV dating shows last year, and producers faced heavy fines accused of violating ‘public morals’. Marriage with Zuhal Topal, Esra Erol and other shows were pulled off the air. A famous dating show duo, Seda Sayan and Uğur Arslan, considered releasing their show Come Here if You’ll Get Married on the internet.
Those dating shows outraged not only conservatives but many other swaths of Turkish society. Feminists considered them an affront to women’s struggle and they signed a petition to ban dating shows en masse. RTUK announced there were around 120 thousand complaints from viewers about the shows.
With the new bill, producers of shows streamed online will need to obtain licenses. “The broadcasts will be supervised the same way RTÜK supervises landline, satellite and cable broadcasts,” reads the new law which gives RTÜK the power to ban shows that don’t get the approval of Turkish Intelligence Agency and the General Directorate of Security.
Family Ties, a recent episode of the US series Designated Survivor angered many viewers when it was broadcast last November. One of the characters in the episode was a thinly veiled representation of Fethullah Gülen, an imam who leads a global Islamist network named Hizmet (‘The Service’).
The Turkish state accuses Hizmet, its US-based leaders and followers in the Turkish Army of masterminding 2016’s failed coup attempt, during which 250 people were killed. Turkey has requested Gülen’s extradition.
But in Family Ties, the Gülen-like character was described as an “activist”, and this led to protests on Twitter in Turkey. Some Turks wanted the show banned. In Turkey Designated Survivor is streamed by Netflix.
In September Netflix will release The Protector, its first Turkish television series by up and coming film director Can Evrenol. “The series follows the epic adventure of Hakan, a young shopkeeper whose modern world gets turned upside down when he learns he’s connected to a secret, ancient order, tasked with protecting Istanbul,” according to a Netflix press release.
“Streaming services give freedom and enthusiasm to directors who are normally reluctant to work for television,” Selin Gürel, a film critic for Milliyet Sanat magazine said.
“Content regulations are unwelcome, but I don’t think anyone would give up telling stories because of them. Directors like Can Evrenol are capable of finding some other way for protecting their style and vision.”
In Gürel’s view, the new regulations will not lead to dramatic changes for Turkish films.
“It is annoying that RTÜK now spreads its control to interactive platforms like Netflix,” said Kerem Akça, a film critic for Posta newspaper. “RTÜK should keep its hands away from paid platforms.”
Akça has high expectations from Evrenol’s new film, but he fears the effects of new regulations on The Protector and future Turkish shows for Netflix can be harmful.
“The real problem is whether RTÜK’s control on content shape-shifts into self-censorship,” Akça said. “Before it does, someone needs to take the necessary steps to avoid content censorship on Netflix.”
But Turkish artists have long found ways of avoiding the censors, and new regulations can even lead to more original thinking.
“This is a new zone for RTÜK,” Gürel, the critic, said. “I am sure that vagueness will be useful for creators, at least for a while.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Press freedom violations in Turkey reported to Mapping Media Freedom since 24 May 2014
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