Editorial Board
INDIA’S ONGOING offensive against the free Internet is a disgrace that the United States can’t afford to look away from — or it would be, if the United States appeared to be paying any attention in the first place. The cost of this complacency extends beyond the world’s largest democracy.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime has spent the past few months playing a political pressure game with technology companies. It is demanding takedowns not only of misinformation but also of plain old criticism and plain old truth, and threatening firms with legal action should they fail to comply. Twitter in particular has been a target of the ruling party’s ire, in part because of its occasional resistance to these demands and in part because of its failure so far to concede to a new cybersecurity regulation that mandates that firms appoint local “grievance officers” to attend to complaints within 24 hours. Most recently, India’s minister for information technology claimed that Twitter could lose its immunity for content posted by users as punishment. He made this declaration, of course, on Twitter.
Despite misleading reports to the contrary from local media, the threat was hollow. Whether Twitter keeps its “safe harbor” protections isn’t up to Mr. Modi and his ministers, but to the Indian courts. Yet it is precisely this tension that makes today’s events in the world’s largest democracy so important to the rest of the world: This isn’t China, where any regime-restraining rule of law has long been absent. India’s lurches toward authoritarianism are obstructed by its own institutions — so the ruling party has turned to intimidation tactics to get what it wants, like putting employees’ physical liberty in danger with laws like the cybersecurity regulation.
The trouble is, these tactics often work. Just this week, following a legal order from the government, Twitter restricted 50 tweets showing a Muslim man being assaulted. The previous week, the platform’s managing director for India was summoned for questioning when the video went viral. Meanwhile, a competitor microblogging platform called Koo has made its name by falling cheerfully into line with government dictates; it’s championed by Hindu nationalists and unburdened by arm-twisting from on high. Koo is attempting much the same ploy in Nigeria, which blocked Twitter this month after the site deleted a tweet by the country’s president. The Nigerian government is reportedly divided over where to go next: ban the platform permanently, or restore it to citizens starved for communication and connection?
What happens in India, in other words, matters a great deal even in nations thousands of miles away — because it sends a signal about what one populous and prominent country thinks still-developing national Internets should look like, and also because it sends a signal about what other countries are willing to tolerate. So far, the United States and its allies have remained largely silent amid this erosion of free expression on the Web, leaving domestic companies on their own to stand up for civil liberties overseas, or to back down. Every day this silence does more harm. Washington Post
