India Is Stifling Kashmir Journalists And Twitter Is Helping Get The Job Done

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the this-isn't-helping dept

India has expressed an interest in being considered a top-tier totalitarian state. Not content to let nearby nations claim all the glory in the “Terrible Places to Live” race, India has been stepping up its censorship and its domestic surveillance, presumably in hopes of being the next country to claim a coveted UN blacklist spot.

The Indian government has asked third party contractors to help it build a massive surveillance network utilizing thousands of cameras and the current cream of the facial recognition crop at the time of deployment. The whole thing needs to be in place less than 8 months after the contract is secured, suggesting the government is more than happy to move forward with whatever it has on hand rather than whatever might actually do the job well.

It’s also climbing the global censorship charts, trailing only Russia, China, and Turkey in various social media platform demographics. But it is the king of Facebook censorship, delivering more takedown demands to Facebook than closest rival, Russia. When you’re out-censoring Russia, you’re playing the censorship game right.

Disputed areas the Indian government claims, but doesn’t actually control, are only encouraging further censorship from the Indian government. Unfortunately, US tech companies are helping the government maintain control of the narrative by silencing dissenting voices. Kunal Majumder of the Committee to Protect Journalists has more details:

On August 10, 2018, the Indian government informed Twitter that an account belonging to Kashmir Narrator, a magazine based in Jammu and Kashmir, was breaking Indian law. The magazine had recently published a cover story on a Kashmiri militant who fought against Indian rule. By the end of the month, Indian police had arrested the journalist who wrote it, Aasif Sultan, and Twitter had withheld the magazine’s account in India, blocking local access to more than 5,000 tweets. As of October 2019, Sultan was still in prison, facing terrorism-related charges that CPJ has repeatedly condemned. And the @KashmirNarrator Twitter account was still withheld throughout the country.

There has been almost no improvement over the past year. CPJ reports the government’s Kashmir-targeted blackout has only been partially listed. To prevent Kashmir-sympathetic reporting from reaching the territory’s residents, the Indian government shut down the region’s connection to the outside world by cutting off its internet and phone connections. Some mobile phones have been able to route around the government’s blockade, but targeted Twitter accounts remain blocked in the region and journalists have been smuggling out reporting using USB sticks.

Since Twitter is one of the best platforms for spreading news quickly, the Indian government has focused its efforts on this platform. It’s following in the footsteps of Turkey and President Recep Erdogan by increasing its targeting of Twitter users. Twitter, unfortunately, has been super-helpful.

A CPJ analysis of those notices reveals that hundreds of thousands of tweets blocked in India since August 2017 under the company’s country withheld content policy were shared by accounts that focus on Kashmir. Among dozens of accounts that were withheld, CPJ identified several besides @KashmirNarrator that were sharing news and opinion, raising serious questions about what safeguards are in place to ensure freedom of the press and the free flow of information.

There are few safeguards built into Indian law. The minimal protections the country allows are not being extended to contested areas the Indian government feels are not deserving of speech protections. Twitter could simply refuse to honor these requests targeting dissenting views, but it has chosen to comply with India’s demands, most likely because the country is home to nearly a billion potential users.

If there’s any upside to this, it’s that the government’s targeting appears to be more keyword-based rather than content-based.

CPJ analyzed every account involved, whether the request was based on a single tweet, several tweets, or the account itself, reviewing more than 400 in total. Around 45 percent of those accounts mentioned Kashmir in the handle or bio, or had recently tweeted about Kashmir, according to CPJ’s review.

This censorship is damage that can be routed around. If Kashmir is one of the keywords sought by Indian censors, removing this word might allow links to reporting to sneak past censors. It also appears Twitter is only blocking in certain regions of the country, so tweets and accounts are still visible as long as Twitter believes viewers aren’t in the affected areas.

That being said, Twitter’s compliance is still problematic. Twitter is unwilling to discuss how it applies local laws to tweets and accounts targeted by governments with track records of stifling dissent. The legal options it has available are generally left unexplored. It makes a certain amount of sense in terms of the bottom line. Challenging foreign rulings and takedown notices requires money and man hours Twitter may not necessarily have to spare. The potential userbase in India is too large to ignore, which means it’s probably too large to be considered expendable when principles are on the line.

US tech companies aren’t doing all that great dealing with competing interests on a worldwide scale. While some concessions can be excused under the theory that some connection is better than nothing, assisting governments in censorship of critics and journalists isn’t acceptable, no matter how much market share is at stake.

Filed Under: censorship, content moderation, india, journalism, kashmir
Companies: twitter