Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week,...
Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week, sign up here.
If you missed our Q&A last week, we spoke to Sumitra Badrinathan about the mechanics of misinformation in India and what it will take to tackle the problem.
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The Big Story: Alien vs Predator
The ongoing battle between Big Government and Big Tech in India calls to mind the tagline to a 15-year-old Hollywood film that pitted two insatiable creatures against one another: “Whoever wins, we lose.”
Over the last week, two of the globe’s social media behemoths – Facebook, though its subsidiary WhatsApp, and Twitter – decided to take issue with the Indian government’s efforts to exert more control over them.
The two cases are slightly different, so lets tackle each one by one:
Twitter & ‘manipulated media’
Summarising Government of India vs Twitter, at least in its most recent iteration, is fairly simple:
The Indian government threw a tantrum after Twitter labeled propaganda from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party as ‘manipulated media.’ It even sent an anti-terrorism unit of the police to Twitter’s offices, and then complained about India being...Read more
