THE Indian government has announced a rule that should worry online platforms purveying news and views in particular about the country’s central government. The rule unveiled this week evidently targets online “intermediaries” such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. They could lose their “safe harbour” protection, should they fail to remove content that is determined as ‘fake news’ against the Indian government. The rub is that the fact-checking body is likely to be handpicked by the government.The move follows a recent spate of critical foreign-origin stories and avid discussions that ensued about the Indian government and about Prime Minister Narendra Modi in particular. Leading the unflattering charge was a two-part BBC documentary on Mr Modi’s tenure as chief minister of Gujarat. The report showed Mr Modi as culpable in the anti-Muslim pogroms that took place under his watch. The documentary was forced off from YouTube but university campuses continued to share it widely in groups across India. Also, the global economic fallout of the so-called Adani affair became another instance of news that clearly didn’t go down well with the Indian government. With elections due by May 2024, the new rule may be aimed at plugging a significant resource on the internet from which bad news for the Modi government continues to seep through.

The Editors’ Guild of India has demanded the suspension of the government’s move, saying the new rules would have deeply adverse implications for press freedom in the country. As per the rules that have been notified, the ministry of electronics and information technology has given itself the power to constitute a fact-checking unit. “The ministry will have sweeping powers to determine what is fake or false or misleading, with respect to any business of the central government and with instructions to social media intermediaries, internet service providers and other service providers to not host such content,” the EGI cautioned.

Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2023