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January 15, 2019

India Internet Law Would Ban ‘Unlawful’ Content, Including Porn

A new, proposed internet censorship law being pushed in India by the government of 68-year-old Prime Minister Narendra Modi (pictured above) would force social media sites to remove any content that the government deems “unlawful,” under an expansive definition that includes porn, as well as any other posted material determined by authorities to be “defamatory, indecent, immoral, hateful or threatening to the public order,” according to a Los Angeles Times report on the prospective law. Under the proposed amendments to the current Information Technology Act in the country of more that 1.3 billion—a population almost equal to one of every five human beings on Earth—any social media platform with more than five million users would be required to maintain an office in India with personnel on staff who could respond quickly to government demands to remove the supposed “unlawful” content, according to the Times report. Content deemed to violate the rules would be required to be taken down within 24 hours of notification by the government. According to a definition posted online by the Indian government last week, “unlawful” material includes anything that could be seen as “grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, pedophilic, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling, or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever.” And that’s not all.  The definition also covers political speech, including any content that “threatens the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order, or causes incitement to the commission of any cognisable offense or prevents investigation of any offense or is insulting any other nation.” The supposed purpose of the law was to control the spread of online “fake news,” which has posed a life-threatening problem in India, where last year an online hoax spread through rural regions of the country claiming that gangs of kidnappers were abducting children in large numbers.  The stories, which had no basis in fact, led to riots, beatings and even lynchings, including the brutal killing of a 63-year-old woman who reportedly had stopped on her way to a religious service to give some candy to a group of children, only to have onlookers decide she was one of the imagined kidnappers. There are about 300 million Facebook users in India, and while the social media giant already bans porn, as AVN.com has reported, Twitter which has “tens of millions” of Indian users, according to Reuters, does not. The encrypted text messaging app WhatsApp also has 200 million users in India and was the main vehicle for the spread of last year’s child kidnapping rumors. The Indian government, however, says that the law, set to take effect on January 31, will make social media safer for all users, with Information Technology official Gopalakrishnan S. telling Reuters, rather implausibly, “This is not an effort to curb freedom of speech, or impose censorship.” Photo By World Economic Forum/Wikimedia Commons 

 
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