A plan to censor all the bad news?

The modification proposed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) to the draft IT Rules, 2021, is bad and violative of the freedom of speech and expression. The proposal requires social media companies to take down news articles if the Press Information Bureau (PIB) identifies them as “fake news.” The PIB is an agency of the government and has no authority to sit in judgement over the worth or genuineness of news. The proposal also allows the government and its departments to authorise any agency other than the PIB to do the fact-checking. If the proposal comes through, any piece of news that the PIB’s fact-finding unit considers to be fake will not be allowed on online intermediaries like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It says that the intermediary shall not be allowed to publish information that “deceives or misleads the addressee about the origin of the message or knowingly and intentionally communicates any misinformation.”

There is no doubt that social media abounds in disinformation, fake news and many kinds of irresponsible and unaccountable ‘news’. But it is not for the government to use the blunt weapon of suppression to clean it up. The PIB’s job is to “disseminate information to the print and electronic media on government policies, programmes, initiatives and achievements.” It is not trained for or have expertise in evaluation and judgement of news. The fact-checking unit was set up three years ago to verify news related to the government. Its functioning has not been satisfactory, and it has made blunders. It will consider everything that is against or critical of the government as disinformation and deserving of excision. Government agencies think and act only within the terms and conditions of their service responsibility. This is particularly true in the country’s present climate in which authoritarian tendencies and attitudes are getting stronger. What the government proposes is only censorship, without calling it so. It is strange that the government is thinking of controlling social media with an organisation like the PIB. The government will actually be the judge, jury and executioner in this situation. And as the Editors’ Guild of India has noted, the government has given itself “a carte blanche to determine what is fake or not with respect to its own work”.

The assumption and use of such powers by the government will prevent the free flow of information in society and will also damage journalism. The right to free speech is a citizen’s basic right and that is what drives free media. Free media is a basic requirement of, indeed synonymous with, democracy. What the government has proposed is an anti-democratic measure. It should drop the proposal.