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Full Text | The Building of a Censorship Infrastructure

Full Text | The Building of a Censorship Infrastructure

The Wire 3 weeks ago

In a recent episode of The Wire Talks, tech policy activist Nikhil Pahwa warns that proposed amendments by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology expand state control over online speech.

Nikhil Pahwa: So, the government's IT rule amendments are essentially an update of the rules that were created, I think first in 2011, that regulate the internet and they have been updated several times since then. In fact, six to seven times in the last five years alone. And they regulate essentially three types of entities. One is streaming services, the other is social media platforms, and the third is news and current affairs. The current updates that MeitY has started a public consultation on are essentially, they do three broad things. One is that they used to transfer power to censor speech online from the Ministry of IT to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which otherwise regulates news and current affairs, and also allows the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to censor general commentary of social media users on matters that are related to news. So, if someone, let us say there is an earthquake somewhere, or if someone is criticising Israel's actions against Iran, or is being critical of the US President Donald Trump, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting can actually censor that, and that is actually what has been happening, that it is being censored. But this transferring of power from the IT Ministry to MIB, this sounds purely procedural. But MIB has a history of regulating news channels, entertainment channels, so they have so-called expertise over it. That is one shift that is taking place. The second change is that there is going to be an inter-departmental committee that is being constituted, which allows the ministry, which can censor content, or censor speech on the internet, through a motor. So, they can issue advisories, they can censor content as and when they want, and especially what they feel deserves to be fact-checked. Now this is basically what the previous version of the rules sought to do, where they tried to create something called a fact-check unit, where the government would have the power to fact-check reporting and news about itself from news organisations. And that was struck down as unconstitutional by the Bombay High Court. So that is the second sort of layer that is coming in. The third is, it sounds very innocuous, but it is fairly insidious, which is that there is an expansion of the powers of the ministry, that it can issue advisories and circulars and all sorts of notifications, and those are basically going to be binding obligations on online platforms, so rules have to be tabled before Parliament and approved. This seems to be a mechanism to bypass those rules and say any advisory will be legally binding, any guidance will be legally binding. So, from a procedural perspective, it just expands the scope of mechanisms that the government has to censor content. So, these are the three things that are happening with these rules, which are particularly worrying.

Sidharth Bhatia: So, you have been talking about news platforms, but obviously it goes beyond that, right?

Nikhil Pahwa: Yes. It goes to individual users.

Sidharth Bhatia: So, it goes to satirists, it goes to even a common citizen, to put it simply.

Nikhil Pahwa: Everyone can. Look, right now, if you look at social media and especially if you look at X or Twitter, you are constantly seeing this little notification for tweets that you cannot see or updates that you cannot see. And there is a phrase in that particular tweet which says, and I will read it out, it says "Due to local regulations, this content is restricted on X". I must have seen this about six times today on my X feed and I'm on X all the time. It means that at least I personally have seen six pieces that have been censored. The amount of censorship that has been taking place over the last month especially and the last two months and a half has just gone up exponentially. You are seeing like today, there is conversation about the SIR, and that content is being censored, so the speed, the scale and the effectiveness of censorship orders has gone up, especially in the last few months. And while we are today talking about these specific rules, Apar Gupta of the Internet Freedom Foundation and I, we wrote an op-ed in the Times of India, identifying what we see as the infrastructure for censorship which has come up in the country. And it is not one rule, but it is one amendment after the next and there is also action happening across government departments. And so, while everyone is looking at what is new, we look back at what has been created that gives all of these powers to the government to censor speech online.

Sidharth Bhatia: So, this was already there, which was very worrying because you saw two high profile, two popular ex-feeds. I think Dr. Nimo Yadav was one of them and there was another, and they managed to go to the court and get this reversed.

Nikhil Pahwa: Yes.

Sidharth Bhatia: But before I come to that, my point here is that already, as you said, this was happening. How will the actual process work?

Nikhil Pahwa: So, the process is already working. I mean, there are two specific laws under which these orders are issued and they are technically different. So, one law, which is called 69A, is a secret government blocking order, and by secret, it means that the government does not disclose who has been censored, why they have been censored, and does not inform the user who has been censored, and there is no recourse available. And that is a definite blocking order that goes out. And there are certain agencies that are in panel to issue that censorship order. And that has gone up in scale substantially. In fact, if you go back to the controversy in 2021 around the CAA-NRC protests, and you remember Twitter was challenging the government a lot.

Sidharth Bhatia: This was before Elon Musk took it over.

Nikhil Pahwa: And they published some of these orders as saying, and I mean, there was some conversation there also, that these orders are unconstitutional, because legit speech, journalist speech was being censored. There was a member of parliament who was also censored, right? Now, Twitter was able to push back at that point in time because they had the opportunity to push back because they were not liable for shutting it down immediately. What has happened since is and there are two types of orders that go out under this particular law. One is an emergency order, which means it has to be taken down immediately, and those are supposed to be rare cases. And the other is a general order, which the platform can also go back and challenge. So first, the government started treating most orders as emergency orders. The rules that came out in February this year reduced the timeline for compliance from, I think, from 36 hours to 3 hours for compliance, which means that no one has the ability for application of mind to an order that they had been given. So that was one set, one change that took place. So, the time gap between an emergency order and a real order has collapsed completely. Everything is an emergency order. So that is why you see that because the speed is increased, the scale is also increased because a platform cannot go back and challenge, you know, this order is not correct. They just have to comply first in order to avoid liability. So that is one part of it. The other part, the other law is a slightly tricky one. It is basically a law that protects platforms like social media platforms for the speech that you and I published on it, except they are required to do something called "due diligence" beforehand. Now, "due diligence" was in the initial way it was constructed or the platform has to have a set of terms and conditions. They have to use those terms and conditions to inform users that this is how you must behave on the platform, and only upon receiving what was called actual knowledge, are they supposed to take that content down? Right. Or they're not supposed to take it on. If they do not act after being informed about illegal content, then they are liable for it. So, what has happened now, is that that entire process is accelerated as a portal called the Sahyog portal, innocuously named, which is used to issue 79A orders, which are the liability related orders that if you do not act, you will be liable for it. Now, what they have done is that they basically created a kind of a hotline between the government and, and a bunch of platforms about 60, 70 platforms or something like that, from what I understand, and Twitter's challenging these rules in court on the grounds that they are largely unconstitutional, but multiple courts have actually upheld it. But what this hotline does is that it immediately sends the order. And because the scale and scope has increased, more and more orders are coming to them, so therefore, they're unable to act, they are unable to apply their mind to it, whether they are liable or not. They need to act quickly. So as an example, the X or Twitter disclosed to the Karnataka High Court that they had received 29,000 orders for taking down content in a six-month period.

Sidharth Bhatia: 29,000?!

Nikhil Pahwa: 29,000. Right. Like through these takedowns, and that means about a hundred and sixty takedown orders per day. Now, X anyway has a skeletal team in India, so they do not have the capacity to deal with it.

So what happens is that if you look at both 69A and 79A blocking and takedown and liability, if you do not take down content, the immediate reaction of every platform is to censor. And then, you know, we know this, that the ministry meets these platforms on a regular basis, many of them are harangued by the ministry for compliance. And over a period of time, they have sort of almost resigned themselves to the fact that India me toh aisa hi hoga, that we are going to get censored.

Sidharth Bhatia: More or less given up?

Nikhil Pahwa: They have given up from whatever my conversations have been, they have all given up. Nobody fights back because the ministry pushes back at all levels. So, at the top level, the CEO gets pressured or the India MD gets pressured from the people at the top, those who are called for meetings regularly, sometimes on very short notice, they get harangued. So, you know, they're almost always firefighting. So, whenever they used to be pushed back, now that appetite for pushback is gone. So, it has been quite unsavoury, in some cases, the behaviour that I have heard about, which I cannot go into because it is private. But they had many of them harangued, some people even were on the verge of quitting because of that. So, while I would say that, we are users of platforms, we are their customers, their job is to protect our speech, as customers of theirs, but they do not because they have so many users. We are all fungible, if I leave X and I move on to Mastodon or I move on to BlueSky, who cares? It is one user, they have millions of users, right? So, platforms are not really pushing back and that is their fault. But they have also been beaten into commission, let us be very clear about that.

Sidharth Bhatia: Which are the others, sorry, I want to ask you, which are the other platforms? You said there are many.

Nikhil Pahwa: So, I mean, I do not really have a laundry list of platforms…

Sidharth Bhatia: But, let us say Facebook, Instagram, including that?

Nikhil Pahwa: So, Facebook, Instagram, ShareChat, Twitter, X, YouTube, these are all platforms. See, my fundamental point is that these platforms are carriers of our speech.

And so, the law has to protect the carriers of speech. What is happening is the law has now converted these carriers of our speech into censors of our speech because the government has disproportionate power over the platforms and laws have been amended to increase the power. So, if you look at this, three tripartite relationships between a user, a government and a platform, what is happening is the government is using platforms to censor speech. And so, this is one fundamental shift that has happened since 2011, where these requests for takedown were every now and then. And that is, I mean, this has been, censorship has been there forever, I remember back during the Northeastern students' exodus in the early, it was the 2008, 2009, 2010, around that time, the then I&B Minister Manish Tiwari had also penned an editorial about how we need to increase internet censorship. Kapil Sibal, you might remember, had also asked for pre-censorship of social media in 2013 or something like that. So, you know, governments come and go, but this behaviour of control and censorship remains, and now it has reached disproportionate heights. So, from what I have seen over the years, and I have been looking at this for almost 20 years now, there are very specific tactics that get used to create these regulations. So, there is hate speech, there is fake news, there is anti-national terrorist content, there is violence against women, violence against children, so, these are all ruses that are used and some of them are legitimate, I'm not saying that, but there are ruses that are used to create broad frameworks for censorship, which then get misused in the absence of transparency and accountability.

Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah…

Nikhil Pahwa: And I remember in 2015, when the ShreyaSinghal case was going on, I remember writing just a stream of consciousness editorial, which is titled, "I don't know", because invariably, when something gets censored on the internet, people tag me, you know, what is going on, I got censored, etc., etc. Or this website got censored, or this app has got censored. So, I wrote this piece called, "I do not know", I do not know who censored something, I do not know why they censored it, I do not know who ordered that censorship, I do not know what law was broken, I do not know how to get it reversed, and I do not know who can be contacted for getting it reversed, right?

So that was the state of helplessness, even in 2015. And honestly, it existed even before that, but it escalated in 2015. And now it is even larger. That feeling of helplessness exists, because sunlight is a disinfectant. Transparency ensures that people are accountable for what they do. And our laws do not are inhibiting transparency, like the meeting that we went to for today with the MeitY secretary, there was a line that said over there that we are going to keep the contents of this meeting, they are going to be held in a fiduciary capacity, so that people can speak freely. Whereas I do not want them to hold it under fiduciary capacity, so I wrote back saying, I do not want you to hold it under fiduciary capacity, here are 70 questions that I'm sending to you, which I drafted and I made them public, and I want these to be available and the comments that I make to be available under RTI.

So even in all these consultation processes that are going on, they have completely shunned any kind of transparency and accountability, where in 2019, the same ministry had published comments received by them, they published 600 pages of comments received by them. Now, they constantly refuse comments received by them under the RTI. The RTI act has been defragged anyway, but even then, they have now found these clauses which go against public interest. So invariably, sometimes at Medianama, what we do is, we ask people to send us the submissions that they have sent to the ministry and we create our own public documentation of submissions, basically giving the finger to the ministry saying we have our own public repository that we are creating. Because, I mean, of course, they have no shame, there is no transparency from them. But we try to create some semblance of it. So, this is a complete breakdown of accountability and government processes. I will give you one other example of breakdown. So, the government's pre-legislative consultation policy, I know it is a mouthful, but it basically sets the rules as per which the government should run a public consultation to receive comments from people. That basically says that you must hold a 30-day consultation minimum in writing comments and you must also publish the comments that you receive. Not only are they not publishing the comments, the deadlines have got crunched. So, this consultation had a 15-day deadline for something that is of such significance.

The last consultation had a 10-day implementation deadline for something that is a major product shift, and by the way, we have checked, none of the platforms have actually implemented those, so they're all in violation, but they gave only a 10-day deadline for implementing. So, it is almost like we will do whatever they want, and people have to abide by it because there is no check. Courts are not doing anything anyway about these things, Parliament is not holding the government to account, there is supposed to be a committee of subordinate legislation that is supposed to look into these rules. Unfortunately, we have not heard any critique from them of these rules, right, of these rules that have been amended over the years. And these rules have been amended, I think, seven times in the last five years, since 2021. Now, if you go back to the fact-check unit case, it took one year for the Bombay High Court to strike it down. By that time, two new rules had come up. So, the ability of the ministry to issue new rules is faster than the ability for citizens to get something unconstitutional taken down. So, you know, till when will people keep pushing back also and going to court because going to court is tedious, it is expensive. And so we only have, our only hope left is the Supreme Court of India.

Sidharth Bhatia: So just on that, you know, so the citizen clearly, it is tedious, it is expensive, it is, you know, quite possible that somebody may say, why bother? But two citizens, two X users, Twitter users went to court and got their accounts restored. What is the citizen's option?

Nikhil Pahwa: I mean, going to court, so a couple of them went. By the way, account blocking itself for me is very, very problematic because if there is one update or one post that is illegal from a user, it is not indicative of a pattern. And anyway, there is no transparency about whether what they have done is illegal or not. But there are instances where accounts get blocked and we do not know why. What happens when accounts get blocked is that if there was legal speech in the past, that also gets censored, and you are foreclosing future speech, assuming that they will violate some law in the future. So, whereas the law is meant to be enforced on a single piece of content, one point of speech, it is now that the blocking orders are being used to basically shut down entire accounts that may be, and from the things that we have seen censored, there are largely things that are critical of the government or the politicians in the government and the prime minister. But there are instances, for example, where speech that is related to criticism of Israel or even the United States that is being censored in India. So, I think that we have gone beyond the bounds of reasonability in the restrictions that we are seeing. And like I said, the Supreme Court needs to take this up, but then we can only hope from the Supreme Court.

Sidharth Bhatia: So, you think that this is going to have a chilling effect on people saying what is on their minds?

Nikhil Pahwa: I do not know, but I think, I mean, speech is already being censored. If anything, I mean, I cannot speak for everyone, but I think there is also a sense of apathy that is developing, saying, you know, why bother talking about this because nobody's listening? Why bother talking about it if I'm getting censored? So there are only some well-meaning people, especially journalists and activists who are raising these issues and citizens who are just talking about, you know, their business, where I went out for lunch. Some of them turn down and say, I'm glad you are fighting this fight, but they do not want to get involved in this because why bother? So, you know, I'm saying there is a chilling effect, but there is also apathy that I'm seeing and I'm seeing apathy more than I'm seeing chilling effect. People do not care anymore.

Sidharth Bhatia: No, that is absolutely true. That is absolutely true. We found that one particular animated cartoon, which the government did not like of ours on Instagram, they wanted to, you know, stop that content. But the entire Instagram account was shut down. And we found it very difficult to get the ordinary citizen worked up about it. It is your fight. Please handle it. We support you, but we do not want to get involved, so that is definitely…

Nikhil Pahwa: I will give you one really amusing instance, because I remember reporting on this back in 2014. Do you know Kuwait also takes down internet content? But what Kuwait does is that it puts up a page that says, this content is being taken down by orders of this ministry, in case you want to challenge it, please go here or email something of that sort. Right. So even Kuwait had a recourse mechanism for content that was taken down online. Here, sometimes content is taken down and you do not even know. So, we are supposed to be a mother or democracy or whatever, but Kuwait, which is not a democracy, has better accountability and recourse standards than we do. I mean it is hilarious and it is shameful

Sidharth Bhatia: What is the range that has changed by these amendments of the, of course it has gone from MeitY to MIB…

Nikhil Pahwa: Not yet, it is going.

Sidharth Bhatia: no, yeah, it is going, but what has changed in terms… can any ministry anywhere do this now?

Nikhil Pahwa: So, it depends on which ministries are empowered to take action and on what and that is a legal nuance that I do not necessarily have, but the number of ministries, I mean that can order takedowns… state governments can order takedowns, so the scale and scope has increased substantially.

Sidharth Bhatia: So basically, the Assam government or West Bengal government or indeed the Maharashtra government where we are based, does not like something and it can take it down and this is definitely going to create chaos. News organisations are one thing, common citizens as you say, there is apathy, but what I fear is that satire, jokes, cartoons, humour, that will also get impacted in a big way.

Nikhil Pahwa: So, let me piece it together for you, so to speak, because quite often we look at just one part of it and not the whole, and what we are seeing is basically why I call it an infrastructure is because it literally operates like that. It has scale because the reasons for which posts are taken down are continuously expanding, and the scale of entities that are getting impacted has expanded substantially. Streaming services, news websites, individual users online apps, so one is an expansion of scale and scope, the other is that it is operating with speed- a three hour takedown and the government is actually thinking of a one hour takedown guideline where everything will be in emergency order, so that is happening where hundreds of orders are being sent at the same time and this systematic creation of the Sahyog portal which operates as a hotline between platforms and government bodies, and I think this has 33 states and 7 central agencies and 72 companies are on boarded, so that is again the number of entities that are covered, all of this is operating without any transparency and accountability, and the entire law making process is collapsed because the rules are being made so fast, at times they are predetermined, the consultation process are fast, there is no transparency in the consultation process, so, I see this as an infrastructure that is being built and every amendment that comes in is like another layer being put onto the infrastructure.

So, while most people are focused on this right now, there was a private meeting that I was a part of where we were discussing some of these rules and I said, look, we need to look at these points as checkpoints and not as end states, today it is this, tomorrow it will be something else, they will keep expanding. And it is not just expanding here, you have other departments also that are like DOT now is enforcing sim binding so your mobile phones is now linked to your WhatsApp account all the time. It is bringing internet companies under telecom regulation if they use a mobile number for authentication. At the same time the TRAI has now brought apps under its jurisdiction, even though the TRAI Act does not allow it. So, the spread with which the internet is being regulated has expanded considerably. The Ministry of Health issued a notification that streaming services should show in the middle of every episode to show an anti- smoking commercial. So, everyone is just trying to find ways of regulating, one can argue for example, banning of social media for children, but no one takes into account the need for agency for kids above the age of thirteen, because you suddenly cannot suck them into a social media environment. So every rule is being used to create control mechanism, and MeitY secretary in a meeting with the National Human Right Commission on age dating citizens , for children , he said that online access is public infrastructure, and this is the first time that I have seen speech being referred to as public infrastructure, which means that the government can license it, it can put checkpoints, it can create tolls, it can prevent people from going through. Whereas, historically the internet has always been likened to speech which is constitutionally protected.

Sidharth Bhatia: Free speech?

Nikhil Pahwa: So, free speech, right? So, let us not forget that the right to offend is an integral part of free speech. In the UN it is included that the right to offend is one of the rights contained in speech. Right, so what you are seeing is a shift in focus, nazaria alag hai, the way that you are looking at it is saying, that this is not constitutionally protected speech, we control your access, and you are seeing tis control over access being looked at from a very different lens, and this control is going to keep increasing because of how they are thinking about this.

Sidharth Bhatia: But there is a lot of fake news and a lot of dangerous trolling, lot of other hate speech, etc., so is there an argument to say that that should be brought down immediately?

Nikhil Pahwa: Yes, absolutely. I completely agree, it should be and end non- consensual secular imagery should be taken down. But those are very clear deterministic situations. You know it is wrong, but there are instances you cannot be sure and that is what makes speech tricky and that is why it has to be handled by the judiciary. Now the scale at which it is happening, it is impossible for the judiciary to look into it. I am not saying that I have a solution to these problems, which is why what we need is a nuanced regulation. That is when there is non-consensual secular imagery and there is an order that is sent that the entire machinery must act fast, but if it is contestable speech, then it needs to be also handled with transparency and accountability. So, you know in the Shreya Singhal case which we fought and won in 2015, there was an interesting statement from Justice Nariman in that beautiful judgment that he wrote. He said that blocking orders, there is enough accountability because there is a government review committee, now we know that that is insufficient and Justice Nariman was wrong. Right? But he said that if the user whose speech is being blocked is identifiable then of course they must be given a hearing. The Wire's content was blocked, were you invited for a hearing? You were not. So, the checks and balances that the court had actually introduced both in terms of blocking as well as in terms of takedowns have completely been dismantled now, and that is the problem that that beautiful judgment which is the foundational judgment for free speech which protected our rights written by Justice Nariman now has you know you built an entire infrastructure censorship on top of that and completely dismantled that particular judgment and that we fought very, very hard for, Aseem Trivedi went to jail, those two girls in in Palghar went to jail on that, and let us not forget the Prime Minister Narendra Modi at that point in time was chief minister of Gujarat. He blackened his Twitter picture to protest against censorship.

Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah.

Nikhil Pahwa: And now his government has built this infrastructure censorship. So, I think there needs to be accountability across the board here, because who checks the government on this anymore and so that is why I keep saying we are left with a court of last resort which is the Supreme Court. Otherwise, the way this infrastructure for censorship has scaled, there is going to be very little free speech on the internet, all of it to private platforms by the way it will move to WhatsApp, it is already there, they are trying to figure that out. There was a report Aditi Agrawal who writes the tech place did two very very important stories, one was about the fact that the government had told platforms that they want to figure out a mechanism to check bot activity on the internet, because bots are amplifying certain types of speech which is political speech right, so they are going to one regulate that, and the other one was that when the last set of IT rules came out the IT secretary told the platforms that you know a 10-year timeline for implementation is enough because you should have started preparing to implement when the draft came out. I mean that this is ridiculous. Then that means that the outcome is predetermined. So even with this consultation the outcome is predetermined, they know they are going to transfer the power to MIB. So, this consultation is a farce.

Sidharth Bhatia: I saw your tweet today on X and after the meeting that you had with MeitY's officials where you have said clearly among the many things that you have laid down that these rules should be withdrawn. So, you have said it unequivocally and very very straightforward that there is at this moment no consultation and let us see midway etc. Why do you say that?

Nikhil Pahwa: No, no, no it is not just that these rules should be withdrawn, I have also said this in my opening remarks, maybe I did not put it in my tweet that the infrastructure of censorship that has been created that must be dismantled.

They are essential. We need to start over with this, we need to be more reasonable. There needs to be transparency and accountability. What we are seeing is clearly unconstitutional and our courts need to uphold this. They are what we rely on to keep a check on government

Sidharth Bhatia: What do you think, what action will happen towards that?

Nikhil Pahwa: Nothing. I don't see anything happening. Who is going to go to court? Where is civil society left in this country? They went after CIS.

CIS, Centre for Internet and Society. That was a very meaningful organisation. Most civil society organisations are a shell of what they used to be when it comes to the internet. I know because we fought censorship back in 2013-14 which led to the Shreya Singhal judgment. I and the people who formed IFFF, together we fought the net neutrality campaign and we won and we had a very healthy civil society in the country at that point in time. It has been dismantled, kuch nhi bacha.

Sidharth Bhatia: So, do you think that it is almost inevitable?

Nikhil Pahwa: I think it is inevitable unless someone has the gumption to go to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court actually takes this up. And you know I don't know who will go to court at that time there was Shreya Singhal who did and all the other petitions got clubbed under the petition that she filed, and we had Justice Nariman and Justice Chelameswar and Justice Bobde who looked at the issue, and I remember Justice Bobde had a lot of technical questions and someone actually told me at that point in time that he is researching till late in the night on his own right. So we had judges who wanted to uphold these rights and did their homework. Look at the Pegasus case, where my uncle professor Jagdeep Chhokar of ADR was a petitioner, he is no more now but he had filed that case and along with others and I remember justice Ramana saying in the hearing that we don't want to get into issues of national security but national security is not defined and the government neither confirmed nor denied that they have used Pegasus in that case, right. The technical committee report is still not public, and the technical depositions that took place, the videos were made put online in the interest of transparency, there were some presentations that made it adequately clear that there is a mechanism to identify that the Indian government had got Pegasus, but that case the Supreme Court has not heard. So when it comes to civil liberties, I think the Supreme Court needs to step up now.

Sidharth Bhatia: You are pessimistic, Nikhil?

Nikhil Pahwa: I am now just resigned to the fact that what will be will be that is all, because I can see that there is no movement you know, the Sahyog portal was upheld by one of the courts whereas it is not backed by law. We are seeing the government, these IT rules are largely illegal in the amendments that have been made. How are news organisations covered under these rules when the original act does not allow it? So, there is unconstitutional activity happening from the government in amending these laws.

I'm not a lawyer but a lawyer will confirm this and I they have confirmed it to me, but no one is keeping a check for them. Parliament isn't the courts are not, except in a few cases where the Bombay High Court shut down the fact check unit. So, you know I think we are seeing a certain how should I say this, there is a phrase in technology because I live and breathe in the tech space, which is, move fast and break things, and the pace at which things are changing I can see that things are also clearly breaking…

Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah I suppose, the codes are definitely one thing and perhaps and this may sound outlandish perhaps subversive citizenry might be another where they continue doing it.

So after all there is a scale to these platforms too. So you cannot, let us see but that may be an outlandish hope but I have seen in the past, citizens can surprise governments sometimes. Anyway, thank you very much Nikhil. That was a very very cogent explanation of what is going on. The date ends on April the 10th if I'm not mistaken.

Nikhil Pahwa: It's going to be extended is what the secretary said today. The date for consultation was supposed to be 14th I think but it's going to be extended. Yes.

Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah. So that may be some indication that perhaps the government is cognizant of the resistance.

Nikhil Pahwa: We are clutching at straws Sidharth when we say something like that.

Sidharth Bhatia: Well, in the past also there have been many cases in my professional personal experience where clutching at straws can pay, can help. So I am not one of those who says the there is no straw left.

Nikhil Pahwa: As they say, umeed pe duniya kayam hai

Sidharth Bhatia: That was Nikhil Pahwa, a tech maven and indefatigable fighter for internet freedom talking about the new proposed IT amendment rules, and he said something very important which I think sums up for me a lot of things and that is that it is not a question of one set of rules or the other, an entire infrastructure has come up to stifle free speech, free online speech uh in this country even if some of those things are legally untenable. We will be back soon next week with another episode of The Wire Talk, till then, from Sidharth Bhatia and the rest of The Wire Talks team, goodbye.

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