Freedom

Newton and the Free Speech Apple

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News18 reports:

Rajkummar Rao’s Newton, which was India’s official entry for the 2018 Oscars’ Best Foreign Language Film category, earned widespread critical acclaim across the globe and received numerous awards and nominations. However, what was Indian cinema’s pride for some has hurt sentiments of a CRPF officer, who has filed a complaint against the makers of the film seeking deletion of a few scenes allegedly portraying the India’s Central Armed Police Forces in a bad light.

You might read this and think, what kind of man would file such a complaint? What’s wrong with him?

The problem here is not the man, though, but the fact that we don’t do enough to protect free speech in this country. There are many laws that can be used to muzzle free expression, and they cannot be challenged on constitutional grounds, because the constitution does not protect free speech. Article 19 (2) allows grounds on which free speech can be muzzled such as “public order, decency or morality” and “defamation,” all of which can be interpreted widely.

We have a whole bunch of IPC laws that make it a crime to offend someone — and people can be offended by anything one says, which makes it all a bit of a joke. The producers of Newton have enough money to put their lawyers on the job, and this case is just a minor nuisance for them. But these laws are liberally use to strike out at dissenters, and they have a chilling effect on potential dissenters.

What’s worse is that it is not just the laws that are messed up. Most people around you — unless you move around in a self-select elite circle — will agree that there need to be these restrictions on speech. That makes it not just a political and legal problem, but also a social one.

Okay, I’ll shut up now.

The Kennedy-Klobuchar Bill – Updates from a Post-Zuckerberg Congress

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(This post is part 1/n of what’s happening in the US Congress post the Zuckerberg testimony.)

If (like me) you spent hours watching Zuckerberg testify before the US Congress, then you’d remember how several legislators promised Facebook they would be tabling bills to regulate social media.

Well, it’s just over two weeks after Zuck’s testimony, and the first such bill is already tabled before the Senate. Sponsored by Democrat Senator Klobuchar and Republican Senator Kennedy, the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Bill, 2018 centers around important principles of user consent and compulsory breach notification.

The bill stresses on drafting the terms and conditions in simple English so that users know exactly what data the website wants to collect, store and process. It also puts the ball back in the user’s court by allowing her to delete her social media data once she becomes aware of a breach.

Well-intentioned as it is, it looks like the Kennedy-Klobuchar bill retains a “Take It or Leave It” binary. It proposes solid user protection and rights, but most of them are squarely based on the power of the data collector to provide only two polar options to the user – to opt-in to its terms, or to opt-out of the platform completely.

If you’ve been so bored that you’ve read your favourite app’s terms and conditions, you will know that several of them today are a binary.

These are called “Take it or Leave It” clauses – so, if a user does not agree to a particular clause her only option is often to not sign up on the platform at all. While this provides simple, easy to understand options to the user, it is also a problem because it may make the user accept terms she is unhappy with. This is why, one of the suggestions data privacy advocates make is that companies collecting data devise smarter, non-binary ways in which the user is assured while still making their platform available to users.

Simplifying these terms and conditions, while still allowing the user multiple options other than to “Take It or Leave It”, as well as being a fast moving service provider at the same time is bound to incredibly tough for the social media company. The good news is, there are some effective ways to do that. However, as the Kennedy-Klobuchar bill rests on the correctness of this approach, its impact is automatically limited.

That said, the Kennedy-Klobuchar bill is an otherwise significant proposal. It looks out for the user by making the data collectors responsible for communicating terms and conditions in a simple manner.

The nerd in me is super excited to do a clause-by-clause breakdown of the bill, but until then, here are some neat summaries of what it talks about:

Senate privacy bill gives Facebook what it asked for.

Senators introduce bipartisan internet privacy bill.

Cute Cats Are Good for Online Activism

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Ever wondered how social media has helped activism in your country? Ethan Zuckerman, an American scholar and activist, coined the “Cute Cat Theory“. This helps make sense of why online movements succeed, especially once they are banished from the web by unhappy governments.

According to this theory, social media is the best stage for activists to rally the masses for a political cause – exactly because the people who visit these websites are there to browse mindless content and not to rage against the system. Digital activists can use these platforms to have easy access to generate mass awareness, and also not be targeted by the government for posting unwelcome content.

And so, although a majority of us who visit Facebook do so to stay connected with our friends or to browse cute cat videos, digital activism is likely to get more traction on these platforms than anywhere else on the web.

Story time!

In the early 2000s, dissatisfaction in Tunisia against its President (Ben Ali) had escalated to a boiling point. Various activist groups started chronicling the shortcomings of the Ali government online. This was also a way of rebelling against the highly authoritarian Tunisian government, which would often censor the internet and online speech. In 2009, when certain dissidents called “Astrubal” posted a video concerning the President on Dailymotion, the government took down the site almost immediately. As knee-jerk reactions go, this is classic – the Tunisian government responded defensively to an action as soon as it could so that any hint of dissent is curbed.

However, this plan backfired because of – you guessed it – the Cute Cat Theory.

Although Astrubal’s footage had received only a few thousand views before the site went under, the abrupt, arbitrary unavailability of Dailymotion to the other millions of residents of Tunisia only ended up creating more publicity for this footage and ultimately, sufficient traction to end Tunisia’s regime under Ali.

The Cute Cat Theory shows that it is actually detrimental for a government to ban entire websites to curb dissent – especially social media. What’s better, because of this entire Dailymotion ban debacle, the number of people protesting against the Ben Ali regime on the streets shot up rapidly. If anything, the attempt to shut the digital vigilantes up ended up backfiring badly for the government.