The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 31 to 45.
India Debates Misuse of Social Media
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-voanews-com-aug-21-2012-anjana-pasricha-india-debates-misuse-of-social-media
<b>India has blocked more than 250 websites after provocative online content spread panic among people from the country's northeast, prompting some of them to flee Indian cities. The crackdown has sparked a debate about how the country will cope with misuse of social media. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Anjana Pasricha's article was originally published by <a class="external-link" href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/08/22/2012082200496.html">Voice of America</a> on August 21, 2012 and re-posted in the <a class="external-link" href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/08/22/2012082200496.html">Chosunilbo</a> on September 4, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Officials say the websites that were blocked had posted edited images and videos of victims of earthquakes and claimed they were those of Muslim victims caught in recent ethnic strife in India's northeastern Assam state and Burma.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the images went viral, rumors began about reprisal attacks against Hindu migrants from the northeast working in other parts of India. Hate text messages warning of violence circulated widely. Worried about their safety, thousands of the migrants fled Indian cities last week to return to Assam.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Taken aback by the mass exodus, the government says the "unity and integrity of the country is at stake."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde says that "elements" had used social networking sites to whip up communal sentiments. Shinde says a number of the sites had been uploaded from Pakistan. Shinde adds that the government has gathered a lot of evidence through the investigation, whether from Facebook communication or text messaging.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Officials have also blamed social networking sites such as Twitter, Yahoo and Facebook for not screening objectionable content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Cyber specialists say the government needs to go beyond the blame game and learn how to manage misuse of social media on the massive scale witnessed last week. About 100 million people in India use the Internet, the third-largest number of net users in the world. About 700 million people have mobile phones.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Cyber law expert, lawyer Pawan Duggal says this is the first time the Internet and mobile-phone technology have been used to incite fear in a community.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"India has to wake up to the need of putting cyber security as the number-one priority for the nation," Duggal noted. "Unfortunately, India does not even have a cyber-security policy. The nation does not have any plan of action, should such an emergency happen again. India needs to have its own cyber army of cyber warriors."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government has been involved in a dispute with web companies such as Google and Facebook for several months and has called for them to devise a voluntary framework to keep offensive material off the web. India routinely asks these companies to remove what it calls "objectionable content," which has led to fears India may be diluting web freedom.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil Abraham heads the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, an advocacy group for net freedom. He says the government's recent crackdown on hundreds of websites is warranted, but says it needs to be more sophisticated and aggressive in handling threats and rumors emanating from the internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Social media websites and other Internet intermediaries should have been asked by the government to run banner advertising or some other form of messaging that revealed the lack of truth in the rumors that were circulating," Abraham explained. "The best way to deal with misinformation is to produce more accurate and more credible information. By just blocking access to fraudulent information, you do not fully undermine the power of rumors because by the time the government had decided to act the photographs and videos had already gone viral. And even though the websites are blocked these images will continue to circulate."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The exodus of northeast migrants from Indian cities has slowed in recent days as India has moved to block multimedia and bulk text messaging, and panic has subsided after repeated assurances of safety by the government.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-voanews-com-aug-21-2012-anjana-pasricha-india-debates-misuse-of-social-media'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-voanews-com-aug-21-2012-anjana-pasricha-india-debates-misuse-of-social-media</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-09-04T12:13:21ZNews ItemIndia limits social media after civil unrest
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/articles-latimes-com-mark-magnier-aug-23-2012-india-limits-social-media-after-civil-unrest
<b>Indian officials have gone too far in limiting text messages and pressuring local Internet firms as well as Twitter and others to block accounts, critics say.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This article by Mark Magnier was published in <a class="external-link" href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/23/world/la-fg-india-twitter-20120824">Los Angeles Times</a> on August 23, 2012 and re-posted in <a class="external-link" href="http://www.channel6newsonline.com/2012/08/after-civil-unrest-indian-government-places-limits-social-media/">Channel 6 News</a> on August 24, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Has the Indian government lost its sense of humor?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">That's what some in India were asking as word spread that authorities had pressured Twitter into blocking several accounts parodying the prime minister after civil unrest that saw dozens of people from northeastern India killed and thousands flee in panic.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This week, the government also imposed a two-week limit of five text messages a day — raised Thursday to 20 — potentially affecting hundreds of millions of people, and pressured local Internet companies as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google to block hundreds of websites and user accounts.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although journalists, free speech advocates and bloggers said the effort to squelch rumors may be justified, several criticized the actions as excessive.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"You cannot burn the entire house to kill one mischievous mouse," said Gyana Ranjan Swain, a senior editor at Voice & Data, a networking trade magazine. "You're in the 21st century. Their thinking is still 50 years old. It's just 'kill the messenger.'"</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Comedians said Indian political humor is evolving and there's more leeway to make fun of politicians than a decade ago, but the nation's mores still call for greater respect than in the West.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"If I tried something like South Park, I'd be put behind bars tomorrow," said Rahul Roushan, founder of Faking News website, which satirizes Indian current events.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Faking News has lampooned the recent corruption scandals, including specious stories about theme restaurants (where customers must bribe waiters or go hungry); and a tongue-in-cheek report that India has banned the zero because too many of them appear nowadays in auditors' reports, after recent coal and telecommunications scandals each allegedly involving more than $30 billion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Roushan, whose site isn't blocked, said he hopes low-level officials misinterpreted government directives.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"I'm still in a state of disbelief," he said. "I don't think the government is so stupid that it can ask that parody accounts get taken down. If they did, God help this country."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A spokesman for the prime minister's office said the blocking of six fake Twitter accounts attributed to the prime minister has been in the works for months and wasn't related to the recent crisis. He said the move was in response to tweets containing hate language and caste insults that readers could easily mistake as the Indian leader's. A dozen Twitter accounts and about 300 websites were blocked, according to news reports.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"We have not lost our sense of humor," said Pankaj Pachauri, the prime minister's spokesman. "We started a procedure to take action against people misrepresenting themselves."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But some Twitter users whose accounts are frozen, including media consultant Kanchan Gupta, counter that the government may be using the crisis to muzzle critics.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"I'm very clear in my mind this is a political decision," said Gupta, who has been critical of corruption and the government's policy drift. "If they were openly confrontational of me, they'd go nowhere, so they're trying this."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Attempts to access his Twitter page Thursday were met with the message: "This website/URL has been blocked until further notice either pursuant to Court orders or on the Directions issued by the Department of Telecommunications."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Even Britain's Queen Elizabeth II has numerous parody accounts so India needs to lighten up, consultant Gupta said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He's received several messages from worried Pakistani friends since the news broke. "They ask if I'm all right, say they hope they haven't frog-marched you to jail," he said. "What irony."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The restrictions are the latest chapter of a crisis that started in July when Muslims and members of the Bodo tribal community in northeastern India clashed over land, jobs and politics. The result: 75 people killed and 300,000 displaced.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Muslims in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, staged a sympathy demonstration last week; two more people were killed and dozens injured.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rumors, hate messages and altered photos of supposed atrocities against Muslims soon spread on social media sites, and several people from northeastern India were beaten in Bangalore and other cities, prompting the crackdown.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">New Delhi has accused Pakistani websites of fanning the online rumors. (Islamabad said it would investigate if there's any proof.) But Indian news media also reported that 20% of the websites blocked contained inflammatory material uploaded by Hindu nationalist groups in India that were apparently trying to stir up sectarian trouble.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Twitter community has responded with derision and humor to limits on text messages on prepaid cellphones.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Feeling deeply insulted that I still have not been blocked," tweeted user @abhijitmajumder. "Victim of govt apathy."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil Abraham, head of the Bangalore civic group Center for Internet and Society, said this week's restrictions are the latest in a series of regulations and recommendations aimed at tightening Internet control.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/articles-latimes-com-mark-magnier-aug-23-2012-india-limits-social-media-after-civil-unrest'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/articles-latimes-com-mark-magnier-aug-23-2012-india-limits-social-media-after-civil-unrest</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceIntermediary LiabilityCensorship2012-09-04T11:59:01ZNews ItemGovernment asks Twitter to block fake 'PMO India' accounts; site fails to respond
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/articles-economictimes-indiatimes-com-govt-asks-twitter-to-block-fake-pmo-india-accounts-site-fails-to-respond
<b>A standoff between the government and microblogging service Twitter, that has got India's online community up in arms, continues, as Twitter is still to act on India's requests to block some of the fake 'PMO India' accounts. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This article was <a class="external-link" href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-08-23/news/33342478_1_twitter-parody-accounts-unlawful-content">published</a> in the Economic Times on August 23, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India's Minister for Communications and Information Technology <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Kapil%20Sibal">Kapil Sibal</a> said, "Twitter has not responded to our requests in a satisfactory manner. The fake accounts are still there. The government of India is contemplating what action should be taken against Twitter and this will be announced as soon as we have finalised our response," he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sibal further added that the government received a response from the <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/US%20Department%20of%20Justice">US Department of Justice</a>, which also agreed that the content on the sites India sought to ban was inappropriate.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Twitter's operating code allows for parody accounts to be allowed as long as such accounts clearly identify as parody. The accounts in question - including @Indian_pm, @PMOIndiaa, @dryumyumsingh, @PM0India- do so.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Unlike other popular parody accounts of world leaders, though, some of these accounts make no attempt to 'spoof' tweets from the Prime Minister. The user of the @PM0India handle, with over 11 thousand followers, has changed their handle to @thehinduexpress, and tweeted "When I've to parody PM, I'll use the other a/c and RT that. For countering media and <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Congress">Congress</a>, this ID will be used. To hell with censorship."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An email by ET to <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Twitter%20Inc">Twitter Inc</a>, received no response at the time of going to press. However, news agency PTI quoted sources saying that Twitter has communicated to the PMO that it would be locating the "unlawful content". "India is important to us and we would like to have clearer communication in these matters in future," PTI quoted Twitter as saying. Official spokesperson for Indian Prime Minister's Office Pankaj Pachauri confirmed that Twitter is looking into the matter.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over the past few days, the government has blocked around 300 websites which it blames for spreading rumours that triggered the exodus of people from the North East from several cities. <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Google">Google</a> and <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Facebook">Facebook</a> on Tuesday told ET they were working with India in removing content which can incite violence.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img class="gwt-Image" src="http://www.economictimes.indiatimes.com/photo/15610805.cms" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"There is clear evidence that these social networks have caused harm and disruption. However, they need to be clearer about the way they go about blocking sites and other links. The block order contained around 20 accounts and over 80 <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Youtube">Youtube</a> videos.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It also had several mainstream media reports and a few Pakistani sites," Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/topic/Centre%20for%20Internet">Centre for Internet</a> and Society said. Analysts do not rule out the possibility that Twitter itself will be blocked in India if it does not act.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/articles-economictimes-indiatimes-com-govt-asks-twitter-to-block-fake-pmo-india-accounts-site-fails-to-respond'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/articles-economictimes-indiatimes-com-govt-asks-twitter-to-block-fake-pmo-india-accounts-site-fails-to-respond</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceIntermediary LiabilityCensorship2012-09-04T12:24:52ZNews ItemAnalysing Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism & Rioting Edition)
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysing-blocked-sites-riots-communalism
<b>Pranesh Prakash does preliminary analysis on a leaked list of the websites blocked from August 18, 2012 till August 21, 2012 by the Indian government.</b>
<hr />
<p><b>Note</b>: This post will be updated as more analysis is done. Last update: 23:59 on August 22, 2012. This is being shared under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence</a>.</p>
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<img src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/oimg?key=0AqefbzxbW_b_dE5rTG9XbkRab0cxWFdoOEgyN01YcWc&oid=1&zx=dskyfic7thzd" />
<hr />
<h2><b>How many items have been blocked?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are a total of 309 specific items (those being URLs, Twitter accounts, img tags, blog posts, blogs, and a handful of websites) that have been blocked. This number is meaningless at one level, given that it doesn't differentiate between the blocking of an entire website (with dozens or hundreds of web pages) from the blocking of a single webpage. However, given that very few websites have been blocked at the domain-level, that number is still reasonably useful.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Please also note, we currently only have information related to what telecom companies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were asked to block till August 21, 2012. We do not have information on what individual web services have been asked to remove. That might take the total count much higher.</p>
<h2><b>Why have these been blocked?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As far as I could determine, all of the blocked items have content (mostly videos and images have been targeted, but also some writings) that are related to communal issues and rioting. (Please note: I am not calling the content itself "communal" or "incitement to rioting", just that the content relates to communal issues and rioting.) This has been done in the context of the recent riots in Assam, Mumbai, UP, and the mass movement of people from Bangalore.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There were reports of parody Twitter accounts having been blocked. Preliminary analysis on the basis of available data show that parody Twitter accounts and satire sites have <i>not</i> been targetted solely for being satirical. For instance, very popular parody Twitter accounts, such as @DrYumYumSingh are not on any of the four orders circulated by the Department of Telecom. (I have no information on whether such parody accounts are being taken up directly with Twitter or not: just that they aren't being blocked at the ISP-level. Media reports indicate <a href="http://goo.gl/GI9jP">six accounts have been taken up with Twitter</a> for being similar to the Prime Minister's Office's account.)</p>
<h2><b>Are the blocks legitimate?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The goodness of the government's intentions seem, quite clearly in my estimation, to be unquestionable. Yet, even with the best intentions, there might be procedural illegalities and over-censorship.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are circumstances in which freedom of speech and expression may legitimately be limited. The circumstances that existed in Bangalore could justifiably result in legitimate limitations on freedom of speech. For instance, I believe that temporary curbs — such as temporarily limiting SMSes & MMSes to a maximum of five each fifteen minutes for a period of two days — would have been helpful.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However it is unclear whether the government has exercised its powers responsibly in this circumstance. The blocking of many of the items on that list are legally questionable and morally indefensible, even while a some of the items ought, in my estimation, to be removed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If the government has blocked these sites under s.69A of the Information Technology Act ("Power to Issue Directions for Blocking for Public Access of Any Information through any Computer Resource"), the persons and intermediaries hosting the content should have been notified provided 48 hours to respond (under Rule 8 of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009). Even if the emergency provision (Rule 9) was used, the block issued on August 18, 2012, should have been introduced before the "Committee for Examination of Request" by August 20, 2012 (i.e., within 48 hours), and that committee should have notified the persons and intermediaries hosting the content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Importantly, even though many of the items on that list are repugnant and do deserve (in my opinion) to be removed, ordering ISPs to block them is largely ineffectual. The people and companies hosting the material should have been asked to remove it, instead of ordering Internet service providers (ISPs) to block them. All larger sites have clear content removal policies, and encouraging communal tensions and hate speech generally wouldn't be tolerated. That this can be done without resort to the dreadful Intermediary Guidelines Rules (which were passed last year) shows that those Rules are unnecessary. It is our belief that <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/constitutional-analysis-of-intermediaries-guidelines-rules">those Rules are also unconstitutional</a>.</p>
<h2><b>Are there any egregious mistakes?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Yes, there are numerous such examples of egregious mistakes.</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Most importantly, some even <b>people and posts debunking rumours have been blocked</b>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Some of the Twitter accounts are of prominent people who write for the mainstream media, and who have written similar content offline. If their online content is being complained about, their offline content should be complained about too.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Quite a number of the links include articles published and reports broadcast in the mainstream media (including a Times Now report, a Telegraph picture gallery, etc.), and in print, making the blocks suspect. Only the online content seems to have been targeted for censorship.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are numerous mistakes and inconsistencies that make blocking pointless and ineffectual.</p>
<ol>
<li>Some of the items are not even web addresses (e.g., a few HTML img tags were included).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Some of the items they have tried to block do not even exist (e.g., one of the Wikipedia URLs).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">An entire domain was blocked on Sunday, and a single post on that domain was blocked on Monday.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">For some Facebook pages, the secure version (https://facebook.com/...) is listed, for others the non-secure version (http://facebook.com/...) is listed.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">For some YouTube videos, the 'base' URL of YouTube videos is blocked, but for other the URL with various parameters (like the "&related=" parameter) is blocked. That means that even nominally 'blocked' videos will be freely accessible.</li>
</ol>
<p>All in all, it is clear that the list was not compiled with sufficient care.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Despite a clear warning by the DIT that "above URLs only" should be blocked, and not "the main websites like www.facebook.com, www.youtube.com, www.twitter.com, etc.", it has been seen that some ISPs (like Airtel) <a href="http://www.labnol.org/india/india-blocks-youtube/25028/">have gone overboard in their blocking</a>.</p>
<h2><b>Why haven't you put up the whole list?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Given the sensitivity of the issue, we felt it would be premature to share the whole list. However, we strongly believe that transparency should be an integral part of all censorship. Hence, this analysis is an attempt to provide some much-needed transparency. We intend to make the entire list public soon, though. (Given how porous such information is, it is likely that someone else will procure the list, and release it sooner than us.)</p>
<h2><b>Why can I still access many items that are supposed to be blocked?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One must keep in mind that fresh orders have been issued on a day-by-day basis, that there are numerous mistakes in the list making it difficult to apply (some of these mistakes have been mentioned above), and the fact that that this order has to be implemented by hundreds of ISPs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Your ISP probably has not have got around to enforcing the blocks yet. At the time of this writing, most ISPs don't seem to be blocking yet. This analysis is based on the orders sent around to ISPs, and not on the basis of actual testing of how many of these have actually been blocked by Airtel, BSNL, Tata, etc.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Additionally, if you are using Twitter through a client (on your desktop, mobile, etc.) instead of the web interface, you will not notice any of the Twitter-related blocks.</p>
<h2><b>So you are fine with censorship?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">No. I believe that in some cases, the government has the legal authority to censor. Yet, exercising that legal authority is usually not productive, and in fact there are other, better ways of limiting the harms caused by speech and information than censorship. Limiting speech might even prove harmful in situations like these, if it ends up restricting people's ability to debunk false rumours. In a separate blog post (to be put up soon), I am examining how all of the government's responses have been flawed both legally and from the perspective of achieving the desired end.</p>
<h2><b>So what should the government have done?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Given that the majority of the information it is targeting is on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, the government could have chosen to fight <i>alongside</i> those services to get content removed expeditiously, rather than fight <i>against</i> them. (There are <a href="http://www.firstpost.com/videos/govt-to-use-social-media-to-prevent-misuse-of-technology-sibal-426231.html">some indications</a> that the government might be working with these services, but it certainly isn't doing enough.)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For instance, it could have asked all of them to expedite their complaints mechanism for a few days, by ensuring that the complaints mechanism is run 24x7 and that they respond quickly to any complaint submitted about communal incitement, spreading of panic, etc. This does not need the passing of an order under any law, but requires good public relations skills and a desire not to treat internet services as enemies. The government could have encouraged regular users to flag false rumours and hate speech on these sites. On such occasions, social networking sites should step up and provide all lawful assistance that the government may require. They should also be more communicative in terms of the help they are providing to the government to curtail panic-inducing rumours and hate speech. (Such measures should largely be reactive, not proactive, to ensure legitimate speech doesn't get curtailed.)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The best antidote for the rumours that spread far and wide and caused a mass movement of people from Bangalore to the North-Eastern states would have been clear debunking of those rumours. Mass outreach to people in the North-East (very often the worried parents) and in Bangalore using SMSes and social media, debunking the very specific allegations and rumours that were floating around, would have been welcome. However, almost no government officials actually used social media platforms to reach out to people to debunk false information and reassure them. Even a Canadian interning in our organization got a reassuring SMS from the Canadian government.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is indeed a pity that the government <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/citizen-engagement-framework-for-e-governance-projects-and-framework-and-guidelines-for-use-of-social-media-by-government-agencies">notified a social media engagement policy today</a>, when the need for it was so very apparent all of the past week.</p>
<h2><b>And what of all this talk of cybersecurity failure and cyber-wars?</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Cybersecurity is indeed a cause of concern for India, but only charlatans and the ignorant would make any connection between India's cybersecurity and recent events. The role of Pakistan deserves a few words. Not many Pakistani websites / webpages have been blocked by the Indian government. Two of the Pakistani webpages that have been blocked are actually pages that debunk the fake images that have been doing the rounds in Pakistan for at least the past month. Even Indian websites <a href="http://kafila.org">like Kafila</a> have noted these fake images long ago, and <a href="http://kafila.org/2012/08/05/national-contestation-not-religion-responsible-for-the-plight-of-myanmars-rohingyas-ayesha-siddiqa/">Ayesha Siddiqa wrote about this on August 5, 2012</a>, and <a href="http://kafila.org/2012/08/13/how-to-start-a-riot-out-of-facebook-yousuf-saeed/">Yousuf Saeed wrote about it on August 13, 2012</a>. Even while material that may have been uploaded from Pakistan, it seems highly unlikely they were targeted at an Indian audience, rather than a Pakistani or global one.</p>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Domain</th><th>Total Number of Entries</th><th>Tuesday, August 21, 2012</th><th>Monday, August 20, 2012</th><th>Sunday, August 19, 2012</th><th>Saturday, August 18, 2012</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ABC.net.au</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>AlJazeera.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>4</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">4</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>AllVoices.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>WN.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>AtjehCyber.net</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>BDCBurma.org</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Bhaskar.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Blogspot.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>4</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">3</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Blogspot.in</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>7</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">3</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Catholic.org</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>CentreRight.in</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>2</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">2</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ColumnPK.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Defence.pk</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>4</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">2</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right; ">
<td style="text-align: left; ">EthioMuslimsMedia.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Facebook.com (HTTP)</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>75</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">36</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">7</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">18</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">14</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right; ">
<td style="text-align: left; ">Facebook.com (HTTPS)</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>27</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>3</td>
<td>23</td>
<td>1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Farazahmed.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>5</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firstpost.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>2</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HaindavaKerelam.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HiddenHarmonies.org</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>HinduJagruti.org</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>2</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Hotklix.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>HumanRights-Iran.ir</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>2</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Intichat.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Irrawady.org</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>IslamabadTimesOnline.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Issuu.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>JafriaNews.com</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>JihadWatch.org</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>2</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">2</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>KavkazCenter</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>MwmJawan.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>My.Opera.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Njuice.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>OnIslam.net</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>PakAlertPress.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Plus.Google.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>4</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Reddit.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Rina.in</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SandeepWeb.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SEAYouthSaySo.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Sheikyermami.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>StormFront.org</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Telegraph.co.uk</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TheDailyNewsEgypt.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TheFaultLines.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>ThePetitionSite.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><b>TheUnity.org</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TimesofIndia.Indiatimes.com <br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TimesOfUmmah.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Tribune.com.pk</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Twitter.com (HTTP)</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Twitter.com (HTTPS)</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>11</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">10</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Twitter account</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>18</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">16</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">2</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>TwoCircles.net</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>2</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">2</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Typepad.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Vidiov.info</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Wikipedia.org</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>3</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">3</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right; ">
<td style="text-align: left; ">Wordpress.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>8</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>2</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>YouTube.com</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>85</b></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">18</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">39</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">14</td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">14</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>YouTu.be</td>
<td style="text-align: right; "><b>1</b></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: right; ">1</td>
<td><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Totals</th><th style="text-align: right; ">309</th><th style="text-align: right; ">65</th><th style="text-align: right; ">88</th><th style="text-align: right; ">80</th><th style="text-align: right; ">75</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>The analysis has been cross-posted/quoted in the following places:</p>
<ol>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2012/09/04231942/Need-a-standard-strategy-to-de.html">LiveMint</a> (September 4, 2012)</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-the-hindu-aug-26-v-sridhar-regulating-the-internet-by-fiat" class="external-link">The Hindu</a> (August 26, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/08/25/opinion-indias-clumsy-twitter-gamble/">Wall Street Journal</a> (August 25, 2012)</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/tech2-in-com-som-isps-block-wordpress-domain-across-india" class="external-link">tech 2</a> (August 25, 2012)</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-china-post-aug-24-2012-india-threatens-action-against-twitter-for-ethnic-violence-rumors" class="external-link">China Post</a> (August 25, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3812819.ece">The Hindu</a> (August 24, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2012/08/23210529/How-ISPs-block-websites-and-wh.html?atype=tp">LiveMint</a> (August 24, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/08/24/india-strong-reactions-to-social-media-censorship/">Global Voices</a> (August 24, 2012)</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/in-reuters-com-david-lalmalsawma-aug-24-2012-indias-social-media-crackdown-reveals-clumsy-govt-machinery" class="external-link">Reuters</a> (August 24, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/PZN75N">Outlook</a> (August 23, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.firstpost.com/tech/epic-fail-how-india-compiled-its-banned-list-of-websites-427522.html">FirstPost.India</a> (August 23, 2012) </li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://ibnlive.in.com/news/haphazard-censorship-leaked-list-of-blocked-sites/284592-11.html">IBN Live</a> (August 23, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://newsclick.in/india/analysing-latest-list-blocked-sites-communalism-rioting-edition">News Click</a> (August 23, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.medianama.com/2012/08/223-india-internet-blocks/">Medianama</a> (August 23, 2012)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://kafila.org/2012/08/23/an-analysis-of-the-latest-round-of-internet-censorship-in-india-communalism-and-rioting-edition-pranesh-prakash/">KAFILA</a> (August 23, 2012)</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ciol-com-aug-23-2012-blocked-websites" class="external-link">CIOL</a> (August 23, 2012)</li>
</ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysing-blocked-sites-riots-communalism'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysing-blocked-sites-riots-communalism</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshIT ActSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionInternet GovernanceFeaturedCensorship2012-09-06T11:52:47ZBlog EntryInternet Analysts Question India’s Efforts to Stem Panic
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-nytimes-vikas-bajaj-aug-21-2012-internet-analysts-question-indias-efforts-to-stem-panic
<b>The Indian government’s efforts to stem a weeklong panic among some ethnic minorities has again put it at odds with Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This article by Vikas Bajaj was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/business/global/internet-analysts-question-indias-efforts-to-stem-panic.html">published</a> by New York Times on August 21, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted. This was reposted in <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/internet-analysts-question-india-s-efforts-to-stem-panic-257760">NDTV</a> on August 22, 2012.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Officials in New Delhi, who have had disagreements with the companies over restrictions on free speech, say the sites are not responding quickly enough to their requests to delete and trace the origins of doctored photos and incendiary posts aimed at people from northeastern India. After receiving threats online and on their phones, tens of thousands of students and migrants from the northeast have left cities like Bangalore, Pune and Chennai in the last week.<br /><br />The government has blocked 245 Web pages since Friday, but still many sites are said to contain fabricated images of violence against Muslims in the northeast and in neighboring Myanmar meant to incite Muslims in cities like Bangalore and Mumbai to attack people from the northeast. India also restricted cellphone users to five text messages a day each for 15 days in an effort to limit the spread of rumors.<br /><br />Officials from Google and industry associations said they were cooperating fully with the authorities. Some industry executives and analysts added that some requests had not been heeded because they were overly broad or violated internal policies and the rights of users.<br /><br />The government, used to exerting significant control over media like newspapers, films and television, has in recent months been frustrated in its effort to extend similar and greater regulations to Web sites, most of which are based in the United States. Late last year, an Indian minister tried to get social media sites to prescreen content created by their users before it was posted. The companies refused and the attempt failed under withering public criticism.<br /><br />While just 100 million of India’s 1.2 billion people use the Internet regularly, the numbers are growing fast among people younger than 25, who make up about half the country’s population. For instance, there were an estimated 46 million active Indian users on Facebook at the end of 2011, up 132 percent from a year earlier.<br /><br />Sunil Abraham, an analyst who has closely followed India’s battles with Internet companies, said last week’s effort to tackle hate speech was justified but poorly managed. He said the first directive from the government was impractically broad, asking all Internet “intermediaries” — a category that includes small cybercafes, Internet service providers and companies like Google and Facebook — to disable all content that was “inflammatory, hateful and inciting violence.”<br /><br />“The Internet intermediaries are responding slowly because now they have to trawl through their networks and identify hate speech,” said Mr. Abraham, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society, a research and advocacy group based in Bangalore. “The government acted appropriately, but without sufficient sophistication.”<br /><br />In the days since the first advisory went out on Aug. 17, government officials have asked companies to delete dozens of specific Web pages. Most of them have been blocked, but officials have not publicly identified them or specified the sites on which they were hosted. Ministers have blamed groups in Pakistan, a neighbor with which India has tense relations, for creating and uploading many of the hateful pages and doctored images.<br /><br />A minister in the Indian government, Milind Deora, acknowledged that officials had received assistance from social media sites but said officials were hoping that the companies would move faster.<br /><br />“There is a sense of importance and urgency, and that’s why the government has taken these out-of-the-way decisions with regards to even curtailing communications,” Mr. Deora, a junior minister of communications and information technology, said in a telephone interview. “And we are hoping for cooperation from the platforms and companies to help us as quickly as possible.”<br /><br />Indian officials have long been concerned about the power of modern communications to exacerbate strife and tension among the nation’s many ethnic and religious groups. While communal violence has broadly declined in the last decade, in part because of faster economic growth, many grievances simmer under the surface. Most recently, fighting between the Bodo tribe and Muslims in the northeastern state of Assam has displaced about half a million people and, through text messages and online posts, affected thousands more across India.<br /><br />Officials at social media companies, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending political leaders, said that they were moving as fast as they could but that policy makers must realize that the company officials have to follow their own internal procedures before deleting content and revealing information like the Internet protocol addresses of users.<br /><br />“Content intended to incite violence, such as hate speech, is prohibited on Google products where we host content, including YouTube, Google Plus and Blogger,” Google said in a statement. “We act quickly to remove such material flagged by our users. We also comply with valid legal requests from authorities wherever possible.”<br /><br />Facebook said in a statement that it also restricts hate speech and “direct calls for violence” and added that it was “working through” requests to remove content. Twitter declined to comment on the Indian government’s request.<br /><br />Telecommunications company executives criticized the government’s response to the crisis as being excessive and clumsy. There was no need to limit text messages to just five a day across the country when problems were concentrated in a handful of big cities, said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India.<br /><br />“It could have been handled much more tactically,” he said.<br /><br />Others said the government could have been more effective had it quickly countered hateful and threatening speech by sending out its own messages, which it was slow to do when migrants from the northeast began leaving Bangalore on Aug. 15.<br /><br />“It has to also reach out on social networking and Internet platforms and dismantle these rumors,” Mr. Abraham said, “and demonstrate that they are false.”</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A version of this article appeared in print on August 22, 2012, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Internet Moves by India to Stem Rumors and Panic Raise Questions.</p>
<hr />
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-nytimes-vikas-bajaj-aug-21-2012-internet-analysts-question-indias-efforts-to-stem-panic'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-nytimes-vikas-bajaj-aug-21-2012-internet-analysts-question-indias-efforts-to-stem-panic</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-09-04T11:46:03ZNews ItemInvisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship
<b>The Indian government wants to censor the Internet without being seen to be censoring the Internet. This article by Pranesh Prakash shows how the government has been able to achieve this through the Information Technology Act and the Intermediary Guidelines Rules it passed in April 2011. It now wants methods of censorship that leave even fewer traces, which is why Mr. Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology talks of Internet 'self-regulation', and has brought about an amendment of the Copyright Act that requires instant removal of content.</b>
<h2>Power of the Internet and Freedom of Expression</h2>
<p>The Internet, as anyone who has ever experienced the wonder of going online would know, is a very different communications platform from any that has existed before. It is the one medium where anybody can directly share their thoughts with billions of other people in an instant. People who would never have any chance of being published in a newspaper now have the opportunity to have a blog and provide their thoughts to the world. This also means that thoughts that many newspapers would decide not to publish can be published online since the Web does not, and more importantly cannot, have any editors to filter content. For many dictatorships, the right of people to freely express their thoughts is something that must be heavily regulated. Unfortunately, we are now faced with the situation where some democratic countries are also trying to do so by censoring the Internet.</p>
<h2>Intermediary Guidelines Rules</h2>
<p>In India, the new <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mit.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR314E_10511%281%29.pdf">'Intermediary Guidelines' Rules</a> and the <a class="external-link" href="http://mit.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR315E_10511%281%29.pdf">Cyber Cafe Rules</a> that have been in effect since April 2011 give not only the government, but all citizens of India, great powers to censor the Internet. These rules, which were made by the Department of Information Technology and not by the Parliament, require that all intermediaries remove content that is 'disparaging', 'relating to... gambling', 'harm minors in any way', to which the user 'does not have rights'. When was the last time you checked wither you had 'rights' to a joke before forwarding it? Did you share a Twitter message containing the term "#IdiotKapilSibal", as thousands of people did a few days ago? Well, that is 'disparaging', and Twitter is required by the new law to block all such content. The government of Sikkim can run advertisements for its PlayWin lottery in newspapers, but under the new law it cannot do so online. As you can see, through these ridiculous examples, the Intermediary Guidelines are very badly thought-out and their drafting is even worse. Worst of all, they are unconstitutional, as they put limits on freedom of speech that contravene <a class="external-link" href="http://lawmin.nic.in/coi/coiason29july08.pdf">Article 19(1)(a) and 19(2) of the Constitution</a>, and do so in a manner that lacks any semblance of due process and fairness.</p>
<h2>Excessive Censoring by Internet Companies</h2>
<p>We, at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, decided to test the censorship powers of the new rules by sending frivolous complaints to a number of intermediaries. Six out of seven intermediaries removed content, including search results listings, on the basis of the most ridiculous complaints. The people whose content was removed were not told, nor was the general public informed that the content was removed. If we hadn't kept track, it would be as though that content never existed. Such censorship existed during Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union. Not even during the Emergency has such censorship ever existed in India. Yet, not only was what the Internet companies did legal under the Intermediary Guideline Rules, but if they had not, they could have been punished for content put up by someone else. That is like punishing the post office for the harmful letters that people may send over post.</p>
<h2>Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors<br /></h2>
<p>Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for 'government criticism'. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.</p>
<h2>'Self-Regulation': Undetectable Censorship</h2>
<p>Mr. Sibal's more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to 'self-regulate' reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is 'objectionable' (to the government). Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google's Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to 'self-regulate' user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about 'transparency' and 'dialogue' only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.</p>
<h2>Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act</h2>
<p>Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr. Sibal's latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn't remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any 'due process' or fair procedure. Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power. <br /><br />It's ultimate effect will be the death of the Internet as we know it. Bid adieu to it while there is still time.</p>
<p><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Invisible Censorship (Marathi version)">The article was translated to Marathi and featured in Lokmat</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshIT ActGoogleAccess to KnowledgeSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionIntellectual Property RightsIntermediary LiabilityFeaturedInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-01-04T08:59:14ZBlog EntryOnline Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/online-pre-censorship-harmful-impractical
<b>The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal wants Internet intermediaries to pre-censor content uploaded by their users. Pranesh Prakash takes issue with this and explains why this is a problem, even if the government's heart is in the right place. Further, he points out that now is the time to take action on the draconian IT Rules which are before the Parliament.</b>
<p>Mr. Sibal is a knowledgeable lawyer, and according to a senior lawyer friend of his with whom I spoke yesterday, greatly committed to ideals of freedom of speech. He would not lightly propose regulations that contravene Article 19(1)(a) [freedom of speech and expression] of our Constitution. Yet his recent proposals regarding controlling online speech seem unreasonable. My conclusion is that the minister has not properly grasped the way the Web works, is frustrated because of the arrogance of companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. And while he has his heart in the right place, his lack of knowledge of the Internet is leading him astray. The more important concern is the<a class="external-link" href="http://www.mit.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/RNUS_CyberLaw_15411.pdf"> IT Rules</a> that have been in force since April 2011.</p>
<h3>Background <br /></h3>
<p>The New York Times scooped a story on Monday revealing that Mr. Sibal and the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mit.gov.in/">MCIT</a> had been <a class="external-link" href="http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/india-asks-google-facebook-others-to-screen-user-content/?scp=2&sq=kapil%20sibal&st=cse">in touch with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft</a>, asking them to set up a system whereby they would manually filter user-generated content before it is published, to ensure that objectionable speech does not get published. Specifically, he mentioned content that hurt people's religious sentiments and content that Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor described as <a class="external-link" href="http://zeenews.india.com/news/nation/i-am-against-web-censorship-shashi-tharoor_745587.html">'vile' and capable of inciting riots as being problems</a>. Lastly, Mr. Sibal defended this as not being "censorship" by the government, but "supervision" of user-generated content by the companies themselves.</p>
<h3>Concerns <br /></h3>
<p>One need not give lectures on the benefits of free speech, and Mr. Sibal is clear that he does not wish to impinge upon it. So one need not point out that freedom of speech means nothing if not the freedom to offend (as long as no harm is caused). There can, of course, be reasonable limitations on freedom of speech as provided in Article 19 of the <a class="external-link" href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm">ICCPR</a> and in Article 19(2) of our Constitution. My problem lies elsewhere.</p>
<h3>Secrecy <br /></h3>
<p>It is unfortunate that the New York Times has to be given credit for Mr. Sibal addressing a press conference on this issue (and he admitted as much). What he is proposing is not enforcement of existing rules and regulations, but of a new restriction on online speech. This should have, in a democracy, been put out for wide-ranging public consultations first.</p>
<h3>Making intermediaries responsible <br /></h3>
<p>The more fundamental disagreement is that over how the question of what should not be published should be decided, and how that decision should be and how that should be carried out, and who can be held liable for unlawful speech. I believe that "to make the intermediary liable for the user violating that code would, I think, not serve the larger interests of the market." Mr. Sibal said that in May this year <a class="external-link" href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355223687825048.html">in an interview with the Wall Street Journal</a>. The intermediaries (that is, all persons and companies who transmit or host content on behalf of a third party), are but messengers just like a post office and do not exercise editorial control, unlike a newspaper. (By all means prosecute Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft whenever they have created unlawful content, have exercised editorial control over unlawful content, have incited and encouraged unlawful activities, or know after a court order or the like that they are hosting illegal content and still do not remove it.)
Newspapers have editors who can take responsibility for content published in the newspaper. They can afford to, because the number of articles in a newspaper is limited. YouTube, which has 48 hours of videos uploaded every minutes, cannot. One wag suggested that Mr. Sibal was not suggesting a means of censorship, but of employment generation and social welfare for censors and editors. To try and extend editorial duties to these 'intermediaries' by executive order or through 'forceful suggestions' to these companies cannot happen without amending s.79 of the Information Technology Act which ensures they are not to be held liable for their user's content: the users are.
Internet speech has, to my knowledge, and to date, has never caused a riot in India. It is when it is translated into inflammatory speeches on the ground with megaphones that offensive speech, whether in books or on the Internet, actually become harmful, and those should be targeted instead. And the same laws that apply to offline speech already apply online. If such speech is inciting violence then the police can be contacted and a magistrate can take action. Indeed, Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc., exercise self-regulation already (excessively and wrongly, I feel sometimes). Any person can flag any content on YouTube or Facebook as violating the site's terms of use. Indeed, even images of breast-feeding mothers have been removed from Facebook on the basis of such complaints. So it is mistaken to think that there is no self-regulation. In two recent cases, the High Courts of Bombay (<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/janhit-manch-v-union-of-india" class="internal-link" title="Janhit Manch & Ors. v. The Union of India"><em>Janhit Manch v. Union of India</em></a>) and Madras (<em>R. Karthikeyan v. Union of India</em>) refused to direct the government and intermediaries to police online content, saying that places an excessive burden on freedom of speech.</p>
<h3>IT Rules, 2011 <br /></h3>
<p>In this regard, the IT Rules published in April 2011 are great offenders. While speech that is 'disparaging' (while not being defamatory) is not prohibited by any statute, yet intermediaries are required not to carry 'disparaging' speech, or speech to which the user has no right (how is this to be judged? do you have rights to the last joke that you forwarded?), or speech that promotes gambling (as the government of Sikkim does through the PlayWin lottery), and a myriad other kinds of speech that are not prohibited in print or on TV. Who is to judge whether something is 'disparaging'? The intermediary itself, on pain of being liable for prosecution if it is found have made the wrong decision. And any person may send a notice to an intermediary to 'disable' content, which has to be done within 36 hours if the intermediary doesn't want to be held liable. Worst of all, there is no requirement to inform the user whose content it is, nor to inform the public that the content is being removed. It just disappears, into a memory hole. It does not require a paranoid conspiracy theorist to see this as a grave threat to freedom of speech.
Many human rights activists and lawyers have made a very strong case that the IT Rules on Intermediary Due Diligence are unconstitutional. Parliament still has an opportunity to reject these rules until the end of the 2012 budget session. Parliamentarians must act now to uphold their oaths to the Constitution.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/online-pre-censorship-harmful-impractical'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/online-pre-censorship-harmful-impractical</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshIT ActObscenityFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityYouTubeSocial mediaInternet GovernanceFeaturedIntermediary LiabilityCensorshipSocial Networking2011-12-12T17:00:50ZBlog EntryDigital AlterNatives with a Cause?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook
<b>Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South. </b>
<p></p>
<p><strong>I</strong><strong>ntroduction</strong></p>
<p>In the 21<sup>st</sup>
Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital
technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the
other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic
expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a
significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging
Information and Knowledge societies.</p>
<p>The young
are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and
persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “
Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in
which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies
to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal
stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify
knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around
an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in
processes of social and political change.</p>
<p><strong>Methodology</strong></p>
<p>In 2010-11,
three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80
people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin
America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into
Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied
by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations
between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners,
educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on
new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do
we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do
Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing
it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social
movements? What are the relationships
that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social
movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable
citizen action outside of institutionalisation?</p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Rationale</strong></p>
<p>One of the
knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’
voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of
the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the
frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than
not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas
and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital
natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and
discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this
in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount
a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their
articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a
result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc.
which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent
from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how
these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to
most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book<strong>.</strong></p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Structure</strong></p>
<p>The
conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and
art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the
mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The
alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class,
education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged
in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part
concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide
spectrum of style and content.</p>
<p><strong>Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook1/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p>The first
part, <em>To Be</em>, looks at the questions
of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What
does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look
at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it
possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions
of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations?
The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas
about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.</p>
<strong>Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook2/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong><strong>
</strong>
<p>In the
second section, <em>To Think,</em> the
contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes,
logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh
perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday
practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology
mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and
structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which
new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and
how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.</p>
<p><strong>Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook3/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<p><em>To Act</em> is the third part that concentrates on stories
from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital
natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that
are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people
engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is
further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging
information and technology contexts.</p>
<strong>
</strong>
<p><strong>Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook4/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></strong></p>
<p>The last
section, <em>To Connect</em>, recognises the
fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to
maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this
distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as
actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look
at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by
these new processes of technologised change.</p>
<p>We see this
book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the
field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital
(alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social
change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions
through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book
furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice,
which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the
popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge
inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will
incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and
consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the
present to change our futures<strong>.</strong></p>
<p><strong><a class="external-link" href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/MyAccount_Login.aspx">Click here</a> to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues</strong></p>
<p>Nishant
Shah</p>
<p>Fieke
Jansen</p>
<p><strong>For media coverage and book reviews,</strong> <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/media-coverage" class="external-link">read here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook</a>
</p>
No publishernishantSocial mediaDigital ActivismRAW PublicationsCampaignDigital NativesAgencyBlank Noise ProjectFeaturedCyberculturesFacebookPublicationsBeyond the DigitalDigital subjectivitiesBooksResearchers at Work2015-04-10T09:22:29ZBlog Entryopen video summit
http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Open%20Video%20Summit..jpg
<b></b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Open%20Video%20Summit..jpg'>http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Open%20Video%20Summit..jpg</a>
</p>
No publisherradhaSocial media2009-11-19T07:04:40ZImageSurvey : Digital Natives with a cause?
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/survey-digital-natives-with-a-cause
<b>This survey seeks to consolidate information about how young people who have grown up with networked technologies use and experience online platforms and tools. It is also one of the first steps we have taken to interact with Digital Natives from around the world — especially in emerging information societies — to learn, understand and explore the possibilities of change via technology that lie before the Digital Natives. The findings from the survey will be presented at a multi-stakeholder conference later this year in The Netherlands.
</b>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society, in collaboration with Hivos' Knowledge Programme, launched the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" Programme in 2008. After the initial study (<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/publications/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf/view" class="external-link">click here for a free download</a>), we are now gathering responses from young users of technology to help us understand, document and support different practices aimed at social transformation and political participation more efficiently.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We believe that the world is changing very fast and that the rise of Internet technologies has a lot to do with it. As young users of technology (as opposed to young users who use technology) adopt, adapt and use these new technologised tools to interact with their environment, new ways of effecting change emerge. This survey is an attempt to capture some of the information which gives us an insight into who the people are, using these technologies, the ways in which they use them and what their perceptions and experiences are.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The survey will not take more than 7 minutes of your time but it will help us get a better sense of the way things are.</p>
<p> </p>
<strong>Please click here so start the
<a href="http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dG9reUVvQ0w4d1ZER3lKOUtFanZMUnc6MA" target="_blank"> survey</a>.</strong>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/survey-digital-natives-with-a-cause'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/survey-digital-natives-with-a-cause</a>
</p>
No publisherpushpaSocial mediaDigital NativesYouthFeaturedDigital subjectivitiesSocial Networking2011-08-04T10:35:43ZBlog EntryIndia Game Developer Summit Bangalore 2010
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/india-game-developer-summit-in-bangalore-2010
<b>The India Game Developer Conference held at Nimhans Convention Centre on the 27th of February, 2010 was attended by Arun Menon who is working on The Gaming and Gold Project at The Centre for Internet and Society. The Developer forum brought together game developers from different sectors of the Game Production Cycle, with hardware manufacturers like Nvidia demonstrating their latest 3d technology and Software developers like Crytek and Adobe demonstrating the latest in developer tools for creating and editing games on multiple platforms.</b>
<p></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The India Game Developer Summit
Lite was sufficiently provocative in showcasing the developer community in
India and the latest advancements made by the corporate sponsors. The presentations
did not appropriately address creative development and management except for a few
made by Keita Iida, Carl Jones, and possibly Varun Nair which stood out for the
specific focus on creativity. The overall focus was on PC gaming with inroads
into Web, mobile, and a smattering of social games. Console Gaming was present in a few statistics presented but did not figure elsewhere at the conference.</p>
<p><strong>On Presentations</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One key feature found in the
presentations made by Carl Jones, Keita Iida, and Varun Nair at IGDS was the
focus on creating immersive environments and naturally all the three took
different approaches suiting their areas of specialization. The other
presentations bordered on marketing and sales pitches, promoting the presenters'
products, and were not sufficiently detailed other than pushing the presenter’s
products and services. These three presentations stand out for their focus on
creativity in game development, design, and research with data pertaining to
the industry and not limited to their products or companies.</p>
<p><strong>Carl Jones –
Envision, Enable, Achieve.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Carl Jones from Crytek made an
excellent keynote speech with a focus on their latest advancement; the CRYENGINE
3.0. A demonstration video showcased synchronous editing capabilities for
multiple platforms as well as real time 'edit and play' functionality. What you
see is [truly] what you get. Their engine is currently not set for a public
release but can handle textures and fluid rendering with amazing ease on a
standard 500$ machine. The detailed and fluid real-time editing cuts
development time from weeks to a matter of days, not a possibility a few months earlier. The technology targets low end machines and has a higher
market but both Nvidia and Crytek made it clear that their focus for
development is going to be high end devices and technology for high end
machines.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Crytek’s entire focus is on the
development and sustainability of creativity, so that new technology could
provide better rendering at better speeds and visuals. Cryengine 3.0’s capabilities
in developing a truly interactive, immersive, and realistic environment were
demonstrated at the keynote speech. The destructive environments and
fluid/texture rendering made designing and editing seem as simple as using a
brush (convinced of its capabilities as an engine but still skeptic about its
simplicity in user interactivity). The dynamic lighting, downward light shafts,
ocean rendering, view distance, soft shadows and particle rendering (fog, etc)
and its real-time synchronous editing capabilities left no doubt as to
Cryengine 3.0’s superiority in the competitive game developer market.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The keynote speech recognized one
main deficiency in game development, there is a problem incorporating graphics
and realistic physics. Jones showcased how at Crytek, the motto ‘the difficult
takes a day and impossible takes a week’ works. Looking at the developer tools
demonstrated at the summit that motto is quite realistic. Crytek’s focus is to
make everything interactive and the CryEngine 3.0 demonstrates that focus. As a
matter of fact Crytek has incorporated Star Data from NASA into their games.
Star navigation based on the digitally (re)created skies in their games is
possibility. The elements they bring in to build in realism to gaming will be interesting to
follow, since realism often meant higher graphics requirements.</p>
<p><strong>Keita Iida –
Technology and Market Trends in the PC game Industry</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The focused session by Keita Iida
of Nvidia placed the growth of Indian markets in perspective including online markets (and digital releases) and offline growth plotted through hardware sales. The numbers and
statistics presented showcased the strength of the growing gaming market particularly
in Asia. The revenues of the Asia segment in the entire MMOG revenues is 76.6
percent globally, the United States and the West is lagging in terms of revenue
generation in the MMOG segment but their recent growth is set to shoot up to
1.3-1.5 billion USD by 2013. Similar numbers in the social gaming segment was
also reiterated by Sumit Gupta (the CEO and founder of BitRhymes). What they
both articulated differently was that there was tremendous money in gaming both
online and offline and India had sufficient infrastructure to capitalize on the
gaming markets for online as well as offline products and releases.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Keita Iida argued that the online
gaming market in India was in excess of 60 million USD assuming that these
games were serviced locally. This still leaves out contribution from the Indian segment globally, such figures are also hard to plot out. Some of the numbers that Nvidia made available
were from their own sales and marketing statistics. The DX10 capable computers
globally were 171 Million as of 2009 and DX9 capable machines around
102million, which had a Geforce installed base. Keita Iida's statistics pointed
to one thing - the Asian markets were far ahead of the other markets both in online and offline releases. Nvidia as an organization and developer would provide an ideal
space for game developers to reach out to a larger global market provided they
were Nvidia technology compatible. Keita Iida made an effective marketing pitch
for Nvidia and provided enough data and statistics globally and locally as well
as company specific data that made the presentation more accessible. This
presentation was one of the few that involved industry movements and statistics
with a focus on creative development.</p>
<p><strong>Varun Nair - Quality Asset Creation & Sound as a
Storyteller</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The most creative presentation
was perhaps the one made by Varun Nair on 'Sound as Storytelling and Quality Asset
creation'. We had interacted prior to the conference as well as during the
presentation and he provided a lot of information on the pre- and post-production cycles where sound design and incorporation was most effective. His
presentation was remarkably different and stood out from the others largely
because his focus was not on pushing his own projects or company agenda, rather
he attempted to place the relevance of the sound design industry in the
creative processes of the game’s design stages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The session focused on the
relevance of sound and visuals and the effective placement and modulation of
sound to the visuals to communicate the desired effect. The main example used was an
FPS where the ambient sounds and the player sounds had to be placed in
perspective with the enemy sounds to create an immersive environment. This translates into sounds being modulated and dynamic as gameplay progresses to effectively create immersive structures. The lack
of this immersive effect will create confusion and destroy the effect even if
the visuals are designed effectively. This is interesting largely because if
you hear gunfire not represented in your visuals - as a character - you’re able to react
effectively to the enemy based on sound alone. Quite a few games use this
strategy to provide and create an immersive structure. There was a good
emphasis on the development of sound particularly since it enables a certain
human emotional response to that sound and developers of successful AAA games
have used this strategy to create emotional engagement of the player with the game narratives. Varun Nair also pointed
out the relevance of sound in making connections and here he mentioned using
real world sounds and digitally created and re-engineered sounds. The effects he
demonstrated with a training exercise, where he played out real world sounds
and enhanced sounds to create a suitable environment. On making connections with
the ‘experiential residual narrative’ as the Videogame theorist Henry Jenkins
would put it, Varun Nair pointed out how sound design is created effectively to
cater to certain specific feelings encountered before. Artificial sounds are
specifically created to suit the artificiality of an environment and here he
used the example of ‘Transformers’, the movie to explain artificial sound
effects as well as information overload. The focus of designed sounds is
largely towards creating an environment in which the main focus is to reiterate
the environments artificiality largely used in Sci-Fi media and gaming.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Most sound designers only receive
images and they have to create sounds often from scratch to suit the
environment. In his demonstrations he showcased the kind of creativity that
sound designers and engineers are capable of in designing the environments we
hear and interact with in gaming simulations. Varun Nair also focused on
Information Overload and how the effective blend of sound and visuals would
form an ideal blend to counter this overload. He went has far as saying that at
certain points an underload was preferred since there was less player fatigue
due to overload. The design structures have to be suitably different
particularly for non linear media such as gaming. Varun Nair mentioned the
cocktail party effect where the human mind is able to focus on a few important
sounds and tune out the rest as well as the 2.5 theme rule. The 2.5 theme rule emphasizes the perfect Balance between Visuals, Audio, and Sound effects. Among
others were quality asset creation and the involvement of the sound designer in
the early stages of the game to capitalize on creative development.</p>
<p><strong>Sumit Gupta from
BitRhymes and Hemant Sharma from Adobe</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The presentation by Sumit Gupta
was very detailed, with a focus on audience interactivity. The data Sumit used
was excellent and placed the entire scenario in perspective; perhaps the
overwhelming response to his presentation may have overwhelmed him a little.
The data on social gaming in India and the lack of monetization in the current
market scenario and the possibilities of monetization was explored in detail.
The problem if any was in setting up these structures and infrastructure
backing in India which was lacking. Payment systems and methodologies would
ensure the creation and transaction of virtual goods. The data on the Chinese
and Japanese markets and the Asian and World trends was extremely detailed, so
much so that some of these statistics were scary. Most social gamers do not realize that data is being collected on them as they play and this was
demonstrated in some of the internal statistics that Sumit presented. The
information presented included age groups of the users, their purchasing power,
spending power, and the relationship between the users who trade is almost
totalitarian in terms of information collection. Privacy laws allow that
generic data are collected but the presentation of these data and statistics
reminds the viewer on just how much information is accessible to these
developers. Hemant Sharma’s presentation later was highly technical and
demonstrated the development of games for mobile devices on Adobe Flash CS5
which is currently only out on a beta release. The presentation there also
talked about the ways in which a mobile app could gain access to the OS
features to run better. Most of these features give undue access to the app
developer to geolocationary movement information. Along with access to other
apps which may store generic information which is user specific. This talk shed
light on the amount of access that a mobile app developer has to the
geolocationary and personal data stored on the phone. Although the perspective
was to showcase the functionality of Flash Professional CS5, currently released
as a beta version, details emerged on the kind of easy access a developer has
to change mobile app settings to gather data. The possibilities that a
malicious use of the data would compromise user security emerges strongly when
reflecting on this presentation.</p>
<p><strong>DSKs Presentation –
Sell your Game, Adopt a Game Designer!</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">DSK Supinfogame had a booth at
the India Game Developer Summit along with AIGA the Asian Institute of Gaming
and Animation. DSK’s presentation was to be held by Philippe Vachey but a
change in schedule had another member from DSK make the presentation. Their
focus rested on Gamespot reviews and game journal rankings to showcase the
problems that arise due to the lack of relevant design in games that would
otherwise have been AAA releases. They had some really important points to
make. A 30million USD project is not going to have developers and designers
with one year experience and without a cohesive unit centered on design aspects
a game may as well not make an AAA rating let alone an A or a B rating.</p>
<p><strong>Networking @ IGDS</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Networking at the India Game Developer
Summit was one of the main benefits of the summit. The presentations, other
than the few mentioned here in detail, were largely oriented towards marketing
their own companies and products or sales pitches to this effect. I had already
talked to Varun Nair (from bluefrog presenting Sound as Storyteller and Quality
Asset Creation) prior to meeting him at the conference and discussed mutual
interests in gaming and narrative communication in gaming. Before his
presentation I had the opportunity to get a preview of his presentation and its
main focus on presenting the relevance of sound design and its ideal placement
to create an immersive environment which can be effective or confusing
depending on how the visuals and sounds interact with each other to create an
ideal immersive environment rather than information underload or worse overload
and player fatigue. The discussion also revolved around my current research
project and research interests in the Indian Gaming scene. Varun Nair is based
in Bombay and works for Bluefrog, a company which specialises in sound creation
for games.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Prior to the conference, Rev
Lebaredian and Simon Green from Nvidia Corporation were available at the Nvidia
booth and right after trying out Batman Arkham Asylum in 3D (with the Geforce
3D stereoscopic vision kit); Varun Nair joined us and we discussed my research
interests as well as my project at the Centre for Internet and Society and its
requirements. Rev and Simon were very accessible (not mobbed yet) and gave me a
lot of details on their partnership programs and their products and upcoming
releases. Being engineers they had very little data on the Indian market both
virtual and offline, and the approximate industry revenues. Rev and Simon
offered details on who might have access to the information I needed and told
me some information pertaining to Nvidia might be shared but large part is
internal and not for public access.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The interaction with Kiran was
the most productive and engaging we discussed games of mutual interest and the
goldfarming activities on his own server (one of the highest bids on eBay for
an account on his server was above 566 pounds [GBP]) he also focused on
goldfarming in India and how that is very little documentation of any sort on
these activities. His own research is on improving design in online games to
provide better retention, higher virality, and immersive environments.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Post the key note session, the
opportunity to speak to Philippe Segard and Lionel Chaze from ‘DSK supinfogame’
presented itself. They were designers engaged with game design training and
also had modules that addressed the online gaming segment. On hearing about my
project they assumed that I was adopting a critical theory approach to a single
game and its content and examining only that (which is also something I am
doing as a part of my research read more on <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/gaming">my blog</a>).
I explained some of my research interests and those of the project in examining
the gaming ecosystem in India both virtually and offline, this was more
appealing to both Philippe and Lionel who agreed to give feedback on the
project as it proceeds. Robin Alter from Kreeda Games was available after his
presentation and spoke to me about the future for the Indian markets and the
growth they were expecting in the online as well as offline game segments, as
publishers most of their focus was on offline products. Robin also spoke about
Gold farming in India and how most of it is undocumented and has very little
studies conducted on them particularly in the Indian context. Gold farming
itself is prevalent in India and is not as minor as thought earlier looking at
the responses by Online Server statistics only in India. Playdom’s Business
operations manager Nagabhushan Rao also reiterated that there are cases of gold
farming on their servers and few cases are logged in India as well. However, as
developers they have very few mechanisms to control this activity, largely
since their user base is approximately around 2.5 million (aggregate). He also
happened to mention how Zynga could afford to proactively target such practices
since their large user base would sustain these mitigating blocks. Playdom is
developing a few mechanisms to track such usage and abusage of their credit but
as of early 2010 they have very few mechanisms that would ban player activity
for these practices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The next Game Developer
Conference is expected around the latter part of this year or early next year.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/india-game-developer-summit-in-bangalore-2010'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/india-game-developer-summit-in-bangalore-2010</a>
</p>
No publisherarunConferenceGamingSocial mediaIGDSRPGGame Developer Conference2010-03-09T16:55:33ZBlog EntryFill The Gap: Global Discussion on Digital Natives
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/digital-natives-with-a-cause/dntweet
<b>More often than not people don't understand the new practices inspired by Internet and digital technologies. As such a series of accusations have been leveled against the Digital Natives. Educators, policy makers, scholars, and parents have all raised their worries without hearing out from the people they are concerned about. Hivos has initiated an online global discussion about Digital Natives. So, to voice your opinion, start tweeting with us now #DigitalNatives.</b>
<div class="content-view-full">
<div class="class-event">
<div class="pagecontent">
<h2>If you cannot attend Fill The Gap, you can also join us in a global discussion on some of the issues being discussed at #DigitalNatives<br /></h2>
<br />
<p>1.
Are
you an apolitical consumer, or do you have ambitions?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNatives" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNatives</a></p>
<p>2.
Are
you a little prince or princess, who only wants to talk to like minded people
or are you different?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesPrincess" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesPrincess</a></p>
<p>3.
Is
Wikipedia your bible or do you really know something?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesWiki" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesWiki</a></p>
<p>4.
Are
you a digital dinosaur? They say you don’t know anything about ICT!</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalDinosaur" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalDinosaur</a></p>
<p>5.
Why
use the Internet, why don’t you march the streets?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesProtest" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesProtest</a></p>
<p>6.
Plans
to change the world? What do you need?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesChanceTheWorld" target="_blank">http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesChanceTheWorld</a></p>
<br />If you are in Amsterdam, here is the information you will need to attend the event:<br />
<h2>Fill the Gap! - 7</h2>
<h3>
R U Online?</h3>
<div class="date">Date: 15 January 2010 </div>
<div class="date">Time: 12.30 until
17.00 hour</div>
<div class="date">Location: Het Sieraad, Postjesweg 1, Amsterdam</div>
<br />
<strong></strong>The seventh edition of Fill the Gap! is all about the power of youth
and IT in developing countries. How can their skills be strengthened
and put to use for a better world? Hivos, apart from cohosting the
event, will be involving digital natives to hear their stories about
ICT and engagement.
<br />
<p>
An Open Space event on the potential of new (mobile) media and youth in
developing countries. For everyone in politics, the profit and the
non-profit sectors who is interested in ICT and international
development cooperation.</p>
<p>
The use of new (mobile) technology is the most natural thing in the world for the youth of today.</p>
<p>
Shaped by the digital era and at ease with creativeity, these
innovators use new media to change the world. Just think of the Twitter
revolution in Iran. What can the international development sector learn
from this? How could international development cooperation use the
potential power of youth to tackle development problems?</p>
<p> The seventh edition of Fill the Gap! is all about the power of
youth and IT in developing countries. How can their skills be
strengthened and put to use for a better world? The kick-off will be
hosted by Jennifer Corriero, co-founder of Taking IT Global: the
international platform for youth and the use of new media for a better
world. Then the floor is open to discuss your own ideas with people
from new media, the business world and the international development
sector during the Open Space sessions. Join in: come to Amsterdam on
Friday January 15th and be inspired during Fill the Gap!<br />
<br /> Registration is free. The programme is in English.</p>
<br /><a href="http://www.fill-the-gap.nl/Fill_the_gap_7?" target="_blank">» Fill the Gap</a></div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/digital-natives-with-a-cause/dntweet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/digital-natives-with-a-cause/dntweet</a>
</p>
No publishernishantSocial mediaDigital ActivismDigital GovernanceDigital NativesAgencyYouthFeaturedCyberculturesNew PedagogiesDigital subjectivitiesICT2010-01-22T10:54:13ZBlog EntryInquilab 2.0? Reflections on Online Activism in India*
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop
<b>Research and activism on the Internet in India remain fledgling in spite the media hype, says Anja Kovacs in her blog post that charts online activism in India as it has emerged. </b>
<p>Since the late 1990s when protesters against the WTO in Seattle used a variety of new technologies to revolutionize their ways of protesting so as to further their old goals in the information age, much has been made of the possibilities that new technologies seem to offer social movements. The emergence of Web 2.0 seems to have only multiplied the possibilities of building on the Internet's democratising potentials, so widely heralded since the rise of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, and since then, the use of social media for social change has received widespread media attention worldwide. From Spain to Mexico, activists used the Internet as a central tool in their efforts to organise and mobilise – be it to express their stand against a war in Iraq, against a Costa Rican Free Trade Agreement with the United States, to mobilise support for the Zapatistas of Chiapas, or more recently, to push for a change of guard in Iran.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In 2009, when Nisha Susan launched the Pink Chaddi campaign, the 'ICT for Revolution' buzz finally seemed to have reached India as well. Phenomenally successful in terms of the attention it generated for the issue it sought to address, the campaign sought to protest in a humorous fashion against attacks on women pub-goers in Karnataka by Hindu right wing elements. In only a matter of weeks, Facebook associated with the campaign – 'The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women', which gathered tens of thousands of members. It was ultimately killed off when Susan's Facebook account was cracked by rivals. The campaign was perhaps the singular most successful account of ‘digital activism’ in India so far, and an impressive one by all measures.</p>
<p>The creativity of the campaign should not come as a surprise to those familiar with the long and rich history of activism for social change in India. Organised social actors have been critical influences in the emergence of new social identities as well as on critical policy junctures from colonial times onwards, developing a fascinating and unmistakably Indian language of protest in the process (see Kumar 1997 and Zubaan 2006 for examples from feminist movement).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>As Raka Ray and Mary Faizod Katzenstein (2006) have pointed out, in the post-independence period, such organised activism for long was connected by at least verbal – if not actual – commitment to the common master frame of poverty alleviation and the ending of inequality and injustice, and this irrespective of the particular issues groups were working on. Since the late 1980s, however, a number of far-reaching changes have taken place in India. This period has been marked by the definite demise of secular democratic socialism as the dominant script of the Indian state and its simultaneous replacement by neo-liberalism. Moreover, in the same period, Hindu nationalism as an ideology too has gone from strength to strength, with only in the last five years a slowdown in its ascendancy. While for many traditional social movements of the Left the commitment to social justice remains, in this context a space has undeniably been created for groups with a very different agenda. The considerable popularity of organisations such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, both Hindu nationalist organisations, are prime indications of these transformations. However, the fragmentation of the activist space did not only benefit reactionary elements of society. The final emergence into visibility of a well-articulated middle class queer politics, for example, too, may well in many ways have been facilitated by the evolutions of the past 20 years. Although this point has been mostly elaborated in the context of the US (Hennessey 2000), in India, too, this seems to ring true at least in some senses.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The general shape-shifting of activism in India since the 1990s is not the only contextual factor that deserves obvious consideration in a study like this. In addition, since independence a close link has been forged in policy and people's imagination alike between science and technology on the one hand and development paradigms in India on the other. Not everyone agrees on the benefits of this association: all too frequently, the struggles of grassroots social movements are directed precisely against the outcomes or consequences of a supposedly 'scientifically' inspired development policy. The neo-liberal era is no exception to this: as Carol Upadhya (2004) has shown quite convincingly, the economic reform policies that are at the heart of neo-liberalism have been inspired first and foremost by the information technology sector in India, which has also in turn been their first beneficiary. And today as earlier, Asha Achuthan (2009) has pointed out, in the resistance to these policies, the subaltern who is the agent of grassroots social movements is frequently associated with a pre-technological purity that needs to be maintained in order to resist discourses and material consequences of technological change themselves. In popular discourses, at least, attitudes towards technology inevitably come in a binary mode.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Seeing the context in which digital activism in India has emerged, a number of pressing questions regarding the new forms that even progressive activism takes as it adopts new tools and methods, then, immediately offer themselves. Leaving aside the activities of right wing groups in India, who are the actors that occupy this space for activism and what are their relationship with offline activists groups? Which are the issues online activism seeks to address, and what are its master narratives, goals and audiences? Where does it locate problems in today's society, and what kind of solutions does it propose? How does it posit its relation to the global/international and to the offline-local; to dominant understandings of science and technology, development, or desirable social change? How are these understandings reflected in online activism, including in the choice and use of technologies but also in the discourses that are deployed and the audiences that are targeted? What are its methods, its strategies, its ways of organising? What role is played by organisations, collectives, networks, individuals? In what ways is the field marked by the conjuncture at which it emerged? Do those who first occupy (most of) it also set the parameters? Or do its tools fashion online activism's very conditions of existence?</p>
<p>The value of greater insight into these issues is not immediately apparent to all. For one thing, some would argue that, as connectivity in the emerging IT superpower remains limited, the importance of these questions to those concerned with social justice in India is really marginal. It is true that while commercial Internet services have been available in the country since 1995, for long the number of connections remained abysmally low. Even today, the number of subscriptions has only just crossed the 14 million mark, and barely half of these are broadband subscriptions, severely limiting the usefulness of a wide range of potential online activism tools (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India 2009 – figures are for the second quarter of 2009). According to I-Cube 2008 report (IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India 2008), there were an estimated 57 million claimed urban Internet users in the country in September 2008 and an estimated 42 million active urban Internet users. Corresponding figures for Internet users in rural areas in March 2008 were 5.5 million and 3.3 million respectively. Almost 88 million Indians were believed to be computer-literate at the time. Clearly, then, online activists are a tiny section of an already fairly small, privileged group, and at least in a direct sense, the availability of new tools is thus indeed unlikely to affect all activists or activism in the country.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Some of my own starting points while embarking on this study may seem to further give fuel to arguments against the value of this research. The idea of investigating online activism in India as it emerges followed from my observation – and a troubling one at that for me – that so far, and despite all the hype internationally, more traditional grassroots movements in India seem to have been slow to embrace the Internet as an integral part of their awareness raising and mobilisation strategies. Although they may attract the largest numbers of activists offline, the many so-called 'new' social movements that have emerged since the 1970s and that remain important actors pushing for social change seem most conspicuous by their relative absence online. This is especially true of those critical of current development paradigms and practices: movements fighting against dams, special economic zones or land acquisitions for “development” purposes seem visible only in relatively fragmented and generally marginal ways. Instead, middle-class actors addressing middle class audiences on middle class issues seem to be the flag bearers of Internet activism in India – the Pink Chaddi campaign or VoteReport India, a “collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections” (see votereport.in/blog/about) perhaps among the most well-known illustrations of this argument.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Both points are valid, and yet, while inquilab it may not be, to conclude from this that the study of online activism automatically is of only very limited value would be short-sighted. Indeed, even if the hypothesis that Internet activism is dominated by middle class actors who address middle class concerns is validated (note that in any case considerable segments of the leadership and cadre of grassroots movements, too, tend to come from middle class backgrounds), this is likely to affect all those interested in affecting social change, even if perhaps in varying degrees. For one thing, it would mean that as the public sphere is reshaped, important new quarters of its landscape are inhabited only be the elite, contradicting the still widely popular and even cherished belief (at least among those who are familiar with the Internet) that the Internet is a democratising force. Instead, the proportional visibility in the public sphere of dissenting viewpoints on development, science, neo-liberalism, progress, the state will only decrease. In addition, then, it may also indicate a further refracting of the activism landscape and its master narratives and methods, where different segments of activists increasingly need to vie with each other for recognition and validation of their respective understandings of political processes and of appropriate forms of engaging with these. As such battles intensify it is not too risky to make a prognosis on who will be the main losers. If, in an era in which the old activist master narrative of justice for all remains under strident attack, civil society has come to occupy at the expense of political society (a useful distinction first made by Parth Chatterjee in Chatterjee 2004) a whole arena of activism, this would indeed need to be a cause of concern for all. In order to gauge its ramifications, it is however, crucial to first of all understand in which ways and to what extent this statement rings true.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The current study may well not be able to fully develop all the above and other theoretical strands as they emerge in the course of this research. But what it does promise to do is to outline the breaks and continuities that mark the make-up, strategies, audiences and goals of those who embrace the new possibilities that the Internet provides at the same time as the information age so fundamentally reconstitutes our society. As a starting point for the analysis, this research will therefore, attempt to map the online activism that has taken place in India so far, focusing more specifically on the forms of activism that leave a public record on the Internet (a more extensive debate of various definitional issues is in order – I will take this up in a separate blog post, to follow later, however). At the core of the research will be the construction of a database pertaining to online activism in India with links to email lists, blogs, Facebook groups, popular hash tags and the like. Although much of the activism I will be looking at will be centred around what has come to be known as 'social media', my focus is thus broader than that, as older tools such as e-petitions, discussion boards and list servs, too, will be included in this study. The aim is to be as comprehensive as possible, although for the database to ever be complete will, of course, be an impossibility. Moreover, since only data available in the English language will be collected, the database will automatically have its limitations. The database will be further complemented by interviews with activists who have been involved in key online campaigns and, where appropriate, case studies. It is the data thus gathered that will form the basis of our analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>While the scope of the study is thus admittedly ambitious, the fact that online activism in India is a fairly recent affair – little happened before 2002, and it has only really taken off in the past three years or so – makes this venture not an impossible one. The contribution I hope to make through this research is not simply to work on the Indian context, however. Despite the media hype surrounding the possibilities of the Internet for social change, research on the Internet and activism more generally remains limited so far. The paucity is perhaps particularly acute where activism and social media are concerned (Postill 2009). Moreover, the work that does exist, I argue, tends to look mostly at activists' use of one particular tool, for example YouTube, or Facebook. Sight is thus generally lost of the larger cyberecology of communication in which this use must be located, preventing an opportunity for genuine insight into the ways in which activism is reconfigured from materialising. By using a much wider lens, this research hopes to make a beginning to correcting this lacuna. It is in this way that the importance of the changes that are underway in the Indian activist landscape as elsewhere can be appropriately assessed.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><em><strong>*
Inquilab means revolution</strong></em></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong>References</strong></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Achuthan, Asha (2009).
Re-Wiring Bodies. Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.
<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring/review">http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring/review</a>,
last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Chatterjee, Partha
(2004). <em>The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World</em>. Delhi: Permanent Black.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Hennessy, Rosemary
(2000). <em>Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism</em>.
London: Routledge.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">IMRB and Internet and
Mobile Association of India (2008). I-Cube 2008: Facilitating Citins,
Altins, Fortins (Faster, Higher, Stronger) Internet in India. IMRB
and Internet and Mobile Association of India, Mumbai. <a href="http://www.iamai.in/">www.iamai.in/</a>,
last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Kumar, Radha (1997). <em>The
History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's
Rights and Feminism in India 1800-1990</em>. New Delhi: Zubaan.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Postill, John (2009).
Thoughts on Anthropology and Social Media Activism.
<em>Media/Anthropology</em>,
<a href="http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/">http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/</a><a href="http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/">,
</a>last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Ray, Raka and Mary
Fainsod Katzenstein (2006). Introduction: In the Beginning, There Was
the Nehruvian State. In Raka Ray and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein
(eds.). <em>Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics.</em>
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India (2009). The Indian Telecom Services Performance
Indicators, April-June 2009. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India,
New Delhi. <a href="http://www.trai.gov.in/">www.trai.gov.in</a><a href="http://www.trai.gov.in/">,
</a>last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Upadhya, Carol (2004). A
New Transnational Capitalist Class: Capital Flows, Business Networks
and Entrepreneurs in the Indian Software Industry. <em>Economic and
Political Weekly</em>, 39(48): 5141-5151.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Zubaan (2006). <em>Poster
Women: A Visual History of the Women's Movement in India</em>. New
Delhi: Zubaan.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop</a>
</p>
No publishernishanthistories of internet in IndiaSocial mediaDigital ActivismCyberspaceAccess to Medicineinternet and societyResearchCybercultures2011-08-02T09:25:30ZBlog EntryChina's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai
http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY
<b>Within the context of internet technologies in China, Nishant Shah, drawing from his seven month research in Shanghai, looks at the first embodiment of these technologies in the urbanising city. In this post, he gives a brief overview of the public and academic discourse around youth-technology usage of China's Generation Y digital natives. He draws the techno-narratives of euphoria and despair to show how technology studies has reduced technology to tools and usage and hence even the proponents of internet technologies, often do a disservice to the technology itself. He poses questions about the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of technology and offers the premise upon which structures of reading resistance can be built. The post ends with a preview of the three stories that are to appear next in the series, to see how youth engagement and cultural production can be read as having the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the Digital Natives in China.</b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY'>http://editors.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceSocial mediaShanghaiCyborgsCyberculturesDigital Natives2009-09-21T14:09:16ZBlog EntryRound Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Public Initiatives: A Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/round-table-assessing-efficacy
<b>Zainab Bawa reports on the Round Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies for Public Initiatives, hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, on 17 June 2009, in collaboration with the Liberty Institute, New Delhi. </b>
<p></p>
<p>
In
recent times, there has been an upsurge in the use of ICTs to provide
information to people and to elicit participation. Individuals, corporate
organisations, NGOs, civil society organisations, collectives, municipalities,
political parties and politicians have been using the internet and other
mediums to communicate with people. The round table was organised primarily to
discuss two issues:</p>
<ol><li>What is the
effectiveness of the initiatives introduced in recent times?</li><li>How do we
move forward in terms of partnerships/collaborations in the areas of data
gathering, sharing, dissemination and architecture of information? </li></ol>
<p>Given
the constraints of time, however, we were only able to discuss a few issues with
respect to efficacy of initiatives, rather than come up with a concrete action
plan on how to measure effectiveness of many of the existing initiatives. This
remains an agenda for subsequent meetings.</p>
<p>This round table was the first meeting of its kind. It
brought together participants from diverse backgrounds to discuss key issues
involved in leveraging ICTs towards various ends, and to collaborate with each
other on ongoing initiatives. Participants included researchers,
persons who have developed information platforms and databases, individuals
working in the area of leveraging technology for streamlining processes in
society and people who have been studying usage patterns of social media tools.
Most of the participants were using ICTs to improve information access
related to health issues, education, budgets, development of rural areas and
recently, elections and governance. In the subsequent sections, I will briefly
elaborate on some of the key themes around which discussions took place
during the round table.</p>
<p><strong>Building on Ideas:</strong> In the morning
and pre-lunch sessions, one issue that featured prominently was the importance of developing ideas rather than trying to work out a perfect model that
we believe will solve what we perceive to be people’s problems. Two of the
participants explained that they started implementing ideas as they came to
them, rather than trying to come up with a framework that they thought would
work for the masses. They worked towards evolving their ideas, exploring what
works and what does not. One of them further pointed out that such evolution
cannot be observed as it happens; it only becomes apparent in hindsight. Hence,
discussions such as the current round table are useful.</p>
<p>It is
also important to note that we are still in a nascent stage of understanding
how ICTs can impact people’s lives and deploying them accordingly. As a result, many efforts are likely to be in the stage of trial and error.</p>
<p><strong>Key areas of interest and concern:</strong> Based
on the input from participants in the morning session, we
arrived at a list of areas that require more understanding and discussion.</p>
<ol><li><u>Information gathering, dissemination, access –
including information architecture, technology design</u>:
Here, three issues were discussed:</li>
<ul><li>Who are we talking about when we refer to information
access? It was pointed out that information is crucial particularly for people
who do not have computers and for whom internet is not a priority. The intensity
with which they seek information is remarkable. One of the participants argued
that we undervalue the potential of information to make a difference to
people’s lives.</li><li>How do we deliver information? Providing information
is not enough.</li><li>Representativeness of the information for those who it
is provided for.
</li></ul>
</ol>
<p>Another issue that was referred to
was whether language is a problem, i.e., most information is available only in
English. One of the participants suggested that this is not the case because Google has found that a very small percentage of the population actually refers
to material on the web in languages other than English.</p>
<ol type="1" start="2"><li><u>Community mobilization</u>:
During the deliberations, we referred to the problem of replication of initiatives. Two observers of social media pointed
out that replication happens because people are trying to create their own
unique communities around their initiatives. This is an important insight
for future efforts and also indicates the need to share databases and
information that individuals and organisations have compiled. They also
suggested that it is important to discover existing communities and spaces
where conversations around issues of governance, education, health and
development are taking place. This helps to plug into existing resource
pools and to extend outreach. <br /></li></ol>
<ol type="1" start="3"><li><u>Citizens’ participation</u>:
Initiatives that work and why they
succeed - We briefly discussed the Jaagore campaign and India Vote Report,
which were launched before the 2009 national elections in India to enable
people to register on the electoral rolls and to report irregularities during
elections respectively. Some people found it difficult to register
themselves on the Jaagore website and some had difficulties in finding the
local offices where they needed to follow-up with the process. It was also
pointed out that Vote Report did not connect with the end user because it
would have been easier to report irregularities and anomalies via SMS
rather than trying to report them by logging on to the site. If one looks
at the case of the Online Complaint Management System (OCMS) developed by
Praja, the availability of the telephone hotline service through which
citizens could register their complaints helped in widening usage. Thus,
it appears that two issues are pertinent:</li>
<ul><li>Whether the initiative connects with the people who
are likely to use it;</li><li>Simplicity of design/system that enables more users. <br />
</li></ul>
</ol>
<p><strong>Target
Audience:</strong> One of
the participants pointed out that some initiatives do not work because they are
targeted towards the wrong audiences. For example, when it comes to voting and
elections, poor groups are the ones who go out and vote in large numbers.
Hence, information systems need to be tailored to provide them with the data
that they need most. Access also has to be configured accordingly. In some
instances, the target is too broad to reach out effectively.</p>
<p>It appears that there is a need to
develop strategies on how platforms and databases that have been created to
enhance access to information can be made known among the masses and how people
can be made aware to use them. It is equally important to understand what
constitutes ‘information’ and for whom. Here,
the other issue to explore is how information links back to the people for who
it is provided.</p>
<ol type="1" start="4"><li><u>Technology</u>: In this
area, a key concern was the high costs involved in developing technologies
and whether we could learn from each other’s experience of developing
technologies instead of reinventing the wheel. We also discussed whether
open source software helps to reduce costs of development. The other issue
with respect to open source is whether there is enough assistance and
support available to resolve problems that may crop up during use of
technology from time to time. </li></ol>
<p><strong>Sharing
of Data:</strong> Discussions also veered around the issue of whether
appropriate technology and applications could be created to help with sharing
existing databases and information pools. We did not discuss this issue
in depth, but it remains relevant for subsequent meetings.</p>
<ol type="1" start="5"><li><u>Back end integration</u>: According
to some of the participants, one of major problems is the interface
between government and citizens, which remains weak. Technology
can be used to enhance the interactions. Participants also pointed out
the difficulty in obtaining data from government bodies that is important
to create the interface between government and citizens. A participant
involved with the Jaagore campaign referred to the problem of back-end
integration during their efforts to help citizens register themselves with
the election commission (EC) offices. A participant from Google similarly
reported that they faced problems in obtaining election results from the EC’s
offices as a result of which, they had to rely on their partners for this
information. Here too, we could not deliberate on how to resolve this
problem, but this could be a major theme for a subsequent meeting. <br /></li></ol>
<ol type="1" start="6"><li><u>Performance (monitoring, evaluation)</u>:
One of the themes that participants zeroed in on was the evaluation of
the performance of elected representatives and making this evaluation available for
people to see. Here, the debate was around the problem of evaluation being carried out according to the criteria we set which may not seem relevant
to other sections of society. One of the suggestions that came up was to
develop a matrix for evaluation and put out information accordingly.
People can then use it to make their own judgments. <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/uploads/00016.jpg/image_preview" alt="rt2" class="image-right" title="rt2" /><br /></li></ol>
<p>In
the post-lunch session, some of the participants shared their experiences with
implementation and also the work they and their organisations are currently
engaged with. Towards the end of the round table, each one of the participants
explained their respective projects and how they may wish to collaborate with
other participants (who were present) in their initiatives. An e-group called “CIS-Info-Access” has
been created to take these conversations and collaborations further. </p>
<h3><strong>Evaluation of the Round Table and Way Forward:</strong> <br /></h3>
<p>When
invitations were sent out to people to participate in the round table, many of
the invitees expressed a genuine and enthusiastic interest in being part of
this effort. As mentioned above, one of the reasons for this enthusiasm was
because this was the first meeting of its kind, bringing together
individuals from the fields of technology, research and implementation. We
invited a total of 35 people out of which 27 finally attended the meeting.
The diversity of the participants was an asset in that a variety of issues were
brought to the table. The drawback was that there was not enough time to
discuss some of the pertinent issues in depth. Future meetings can be tailored
to discuss one or two specific themes such as back-end integration and sharing
of information, technology issues, ideas for mobilising citizens and
communities, etc.</p>
<p>The
possibilities of collaboration between participants in this meeting are immense
and we hope that some of the synergies will materialise into concrete outcomes.
Further, a few participants have expressed an interest in organising similar
meetings in their cities/towns, perhaps focusing on a few issues instead of
bringing people together under a broad theme. Of some of the issues discussed,
participants have indicated that back-end integration with government and
ideating on different ways of disseminating data can be further deliberated on
in future. One of the participants also suggested that there is a need to make
‘data’ more relevant to people’s lives.</p>
<p>While
the meeting was fruitful in many respects, one issue needs to be underlined.
This concerns the imagination of internet and ICTs as mediums that can resolve all existing problems with respect to citizen-government
interface, streamlining of processes and provision of information. Such an
overarching imagination of technology overlooks the cultural, economic, social and
political specificities of communities and contexts. Technology
can also have negative implications in some circumstances. It also needs to be
reinforced that technology is embedded in society and culture. Therefore we
need to view technology as one of the avenues among others available which will
facilitate interactions between people and their governments and the state.
Democratisation is more likely to be realised through such a perspective.</p>
<p></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/round-table-assessing-efficacy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/round-table-assessing-efficacy</a>
</p>
No publishersachiaSocial mediaDigital ActivismDigital AccessPublic AccountabilityDiscussionFeaturedTransparency, Politics2011-08-20T22:28:55ZBlog Entry