[throwaway8581]

No sane country can allow their public discourse to be controlled by the peculiar moral pieties of the American elite class. True, important information, e.g. that covid-19 may have originated in a Chinese lab, is actively suppressed by these platforms as part of an internal American struggle for control of information and ideas. Any people that value their own self-determination must reduce the influence of these manipulative platforms on their domestic market.

[_vertigo]

I completely agree. By banning these networks, overall suppression of information will greatly decrease. With these platforms banned, it will be more easy for Indians to encounter information that challenges the dominant narrative of the elites. \s

[tomp]

This is silly and unnecessary sarcasm that doesn't take into account the reality of the world.

Different localities have different dominant networks. E.g. Instagram Stories and Viber in Europe, vs Snapchat and WhatsApp in the US, vs VKontakte in Russia. Clearly, banning a global dominant network will only spur the creation and migration to a more local, but likely still centralized, network. (It might still be equally, or differently but to the same degree, censorious.)

[acituan]

Suppression is not the only problem information endures. False information and overall narrative engineering is capable of doing equal, and probably more, harm than mere absence of information.

> With these platforms banned, it will be more easy for Indians to encounter information that challenges the dominant narrative of the elites.

You assume the "free range" information flowing around is free from the influence of 'the elites'. It might not be by the elites you particularly resent, but rest assured it is still going to be a strata of elites, who have the massive resources to organize, build, publish, market, brand, filter, "fact check" etc what information is allowed to flow around with what credibility.

[throwaway3699]

Wouldn't banning a massive centralised network lead to more people talking over smaller networks?

[dheera]

Banning == censorship, are you sure you want that?

Not from India but personally I'd much rather my government not set such precedents and not have such power to block websites. Next thing you know they'll be blocking credible sites to spread their own misinformation agenda.

[jdauriemma]

You would have a point in an alternate universe where the Indian government is a credible guardian of whatever we might deem public discourse. In this universe, there are no good guys in this conflict.

[boruto]

I know I will be downvoted to oblivion., Rather than Twitter I would rather have the public discourse which is guarded by Indian Govt/ Judiciary, parliament and media irrespective of the spectrum to which they have a bias.

If tomorrow, I say something religious in nature, would such a thing be banned by some person in California who decides it is not rational thought?

[throwaway8581]

No good guys but the oligarchic silicon valley information complex is a definite bad guy that crowds out competing platforms where alternative views might flourish.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

What's Facebook's angle for discouraging the view that Covid may have originated from a lab? E.g, what do they gain from this perspective? Sidenote: because it was being suppressed, I genuinely believed it was fringe theory. I didn't weigh the merits, that is, I considered the filter to just be the truth (because it seemed genuinely reasonable to conclude it was fringe, just because there is so much misinformation out there). My internal metric is: "Does this seem tin foil hat-y?" And I concluded "yes", and moved on. It was a concerning introspection of how I personally evaluate news.

[michaelmrose]

If you see a flash of light in the sky and without further evidence exclaim that aliens have landed and are going to subjugate us and steal our women then you are a crackpot not merely because you are wrong but because you drew your conclusion with a faulty thought process.

If it later turns out that aliens HAVE landed but on a diplomatic mission not an invasion force you are still a crackpot who was partially right not by dint of sagacity but more or less by accident.

The lab story was usually promoted as part of a wider narrative where covid was either portrayed as a deliberate attack by the Chinese or the accidental release of a bioweapon a narrative designed not to explicate but to distract one from laying blame on the Trump administration for its incompetent response. It frequently mixed hypothesis, conjecture, and outright lies.

You can probably be forgiven for having not known there might be a useful hypothesis when it was largely being promoted by liars with corrupt motivation mixed with lies.

[tomp]

It was supported by Trump. Most mainstream media and Silicon Valley (which both align Democrat) therefore opposed it.

[ihsw]

At the time, it gave air to Trump's 2020 election campaign ("orange man bad").

Now, it's an excuse to take the air out of conservative political sentiment.

[throwaway8581]

They face a hostile media and political complex, as well as several thousand aggressively activist employees, that all demand that right-wing information be suppressed.

If Facebook doesn't do what those groups demand, they will be smeared in the media, suffer internal strife, and face punitive antitrust probes.

And of course, many tech executive are true believers in left-wing politics and like that they can use their positions to advance those ideas.

[slg]

It was a fringe theory pushed largely but not exclusively by racists and opportunists that wanted to paint China as the bad guy and shield the previous administration and other politicians from blame for how they reacted to the pandemic.

Totally independent of that, the general scientific community seemed to be much more opposed to the lab theory early on than they are now. It still doesn't appear to be much evidence for it beyond circumstantial stuff, but it is a possibility that more people are engaging with.

Combine these two and it isn't surprising that these platforms cracked down on this type of talk early and are slow to allowing it to start happening again.

[colinmhayes]

Yea, conspiracy theories are problematic. You can put "may" in any statement and it's technically true, doesn't mean facebook/twitter can't mark it as misleading.

[throwaway3699]

Conspiracy theories sometimes turn out to just be conspiracies. That's why we need to be able to talk about them.

I'm not qualified to say if the lab leak has any credence, but it wouldn't be the first time the powers at be have been wrong. Just look at the classic "WMDs in the Middle East" rhetoric that lead us to war.

[boruto]

Thanks to Ministry of truth at Twitter, I feel so much protected from conspiracy theories online.

[moralestapia]

>Yea, conspiracy theories are problematic.

Are they? It's easy to walk down the slippery road that leads to authoritarian behaviors.

[tomjen3]

Is it misleading to say that the CIA did mind control experiments on US citizens and that it lead to domestic terrorism?

Is it misleading to say that a group of doctors conspired to ensure that black Americans died of a disease they could have cured, just so that they could study their effects?

Because those are conspiracy theories, and they are both true.

[throwaway8581]

The point is they dismissed it out of hand and banned anyone who said otherwise. Btw, liberal news outlets are finally admitting now that the lab leak hypothesis is probably right.

[chrononaut]

I am having difficulty deconstructing your argument. Is it since you believe that these platforms are suppressing some plausibly truthful content, all content on these platforms / the platforms themselves should be suppressed?

[throwaway8581]

No, it's because the platform policies enforce a foreign social order. In America, we have our own pieties and taboos and these social media platforms heavily enforce them. Transgenderism, homosexuality, racial equality, gender roles, not every country holds American or European views on those, but those are the only views that are fully allowed on American social media platforms.

India has its own social order. Why should it let its online discourse be controlled by the American social order?

[random314]

This has nothing to do with any lab leak.

This is because fake news being published by the ruling government is being tagged as manipulated media. Calls to violence by the ruling government is also being removed. Pseudoscience covid19 cires by folks from and associated with the ruling party are also being tagged.

[ipsum2]

How does this relate to the article?

[boreas]

It's very interesting, the comment you replied to seems to be using a typical free speech canard in support of increasing censorship.

Their argument doesn't seem relevant to the policy discussed in the article at all.

[Barrin92]

Do you just have to rant about the (unfounded and largely rejected by the scientific community) claim about covid lab leaks to get defense of internet censorship by an increasingly authoritarian Indian government upvoted to the top of hackernews? What the hell is going on

[Aperocky]

> True, important information, e.g. that covid-19 may have originated in a Chinese lab.

The irony.

[tomjen3]

The problem here is that banning those platforms (but not whatsapp for some reason?) will not increase the amount of discussion and information available to the people of India.

[bigpumpkin]

Except the evidence that the virus came from a lab leak is provided by the American government, the arguments are constructed by Americans, and the news leaked and propagated by the American press and American social media networks.

The other side of the debate use the same American tools.

This is more a civil war in American discourse between the liberals and conservatives than anything else.

[JI00912]

Perhaps it appears that way to you because you follow American sources?

[armchairhacker]

This is a really great argument for the ban, upvoted. But I disagree :)

[armchairhacker]

Here is my argument:

I disagree because

1) in this specific case, it seems to be part of India suppressing information, and IMO India's suppression is a much larger issue than Facebook/Twitter/Instagram propagating controlled information (their suppression is different because there are other sites, vs. India cracks down on those other sites).

2) in the more general case, banning Facebook/Twitter/Instagram is controversial and there are more moderate approaches which are at least more practical. For example, you can better educate the public, or convince them to join your own site. It would be hard, sure, but forcing the public to quit Facebook/Twitter/Instagram without full-out rioting would be harder. Heck, you can "teach" children in schools that those sites are bad and the information there is wrong - I'm not arguing you should actually do that, but it would seriously threaten them while technically preserving free speech.

If you aren't actually arguing for a full-scale ban (it was implied), then I 100% agree with what you said.

---

Anyways, the main point of the above comment is to show that I'm glad such a great opinion is not only posted but it was top comment (unfortunately not anymore). It took me a long time to actually find a good argument against it even though it intuitively seemed so "wrong". I really wish this was more common on forums.

[jollybean]

Except in cases where they somewhat dysfunctional systems of FB and US are considerably more rational and functional than the local systems, which is unfortunately very often the case.

[actuator]

I think we should stop asserting that what we perceive to be the right view is the right one for all. I am quite sure the local people there are not wishing for someone from outside to come and save them. This comment sounds a bit tone deaf.

[kabirgoel]

This comment and others on this thread are downright bizarre. It seems some get a perverse pleasure from seeing this ban happen in India, perhaps as a result of anger against what the platforms do in America. I’ve only ever seen this attitude on HN threads about China. It’s a little scary as an Indian to see people bring this rhetoric to India, as if clamping down on the free exchange of information is laudable.

This ban isn’t because of some noble notions of protecting the public discourse. To the contrary, it seems the intention is to suppress it. It’s no secret that the Modi government is irked by criticisms of it on Twitter; it attempted to censor hundreds of tweets critical of its handling of the pandemic. Whatever the government may claim as its reasons for the (currently hypothetical) ban, it seems awfully convenient that it gets to remove the platforms which so many use to voice dissent.

One of the benefits of social media platforms is that they insulate dissenters through anonymity, and the law precipitating this ban also threatens to undermine this power by making these platforms responsible for tracing the originators of information it deems unacceptable. This is not a country where you want the government to have this power. To give you an example of what could go wrong, people in Uttar Pradesh (an Indian state) have been harassed by cops just for asking for oxygen on Twitter and Instagram for their relatives dying of COVID-19. This was because the state government wanted to cover up oxygen shortages. You can just about expect that through this law, the government will be able to find and punish those spreading what it considers wrongthink.

To your point, Indian public discourse is hardly "controlled by the moral pieties of the American elite class." Although there are in absolute numbers millions of Indians on these platforms, they are hardly a blip in the Indian population. Further, millions of Indians including myself also espouse Western values and subscribe to the “American social order” that comments in this thread implicitly refer to. Given that India is a free country, it isn’t for the government to decide whether this is good or bad, any more than the government should be able to decide which god I should worship or which school my kids should go to. India is already a massively heterogeneous country; no Indian is being forced to buy into “the moral pieties of the American elite class,” since these social media networks are strictly optional. But banning them will force people who believe similar things to find alternate places to express them, likely local alternatives where their views will be penalized. Personally, I use Twitter and Instagram to engage with people from around the world, and this will effectively restrict my ability to communicate with many of them.

You can read more about the chilling effects of these laws in this post [1] by the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian nonprofit. (One interesting byproduct of the fact that these laws require originators of information to be traceable is that they effectively constitute a ban on encryption, which I’m sure HN can appreciate is Not Good And Also Very Bad.) I don't expect that these laws will stand, since the reasoning behind them seems blatantly unconstitutional and contrary to the Indian constitution's protections for privacy and free expression.

[1] https://internetfreedom.in/pound-the-alarm-the-clock-strikes...

[boruto]

Twitter thread for the lazy about the same.

https://twitter.com/internetfreedom/status/13967435539050864...

I don't agree with some points mentioned by the IFF org, Couple listed as example, I still think banning them would be a bad step.

> Significant SMIs must enable automated tools (basically AI tech) to identify + take down child sexual abuse material. This can lead to function creep - extreme tech measures contemplated for a limited and serious use will start being utilized for other issues.

How else would you take it down. Hire people to sift through messages? Don't companies already do this using? Are these companies limited now by anything from using these measures given their finances and scale?

> SM platforms don't generate content - you do. They are simply intermediaries who host it. This distinction helps them avoid liability for your content.

True, then why would SM butt in as arbitrator of truth.

[world_peace42]

Heartened to see this at the top. I was expecting to see something like “Gasp! Modi is as bad as the Netanyahu/Hitler!” It’s almost as the rest of the world are not interested in being inundated with the Californian Elite’s warped ideas/ideological doctrine. As an American, it’s obvious now we are a declining power, and one can’t ignore how tech giants have accelerated that. Sensible countries, like India, are right to reject Facebook’s influence (and no, although many will disagree, this is not proof that India is a failed democracy/nazi state).

[kabirgoel]

This comment misunderstands the motivation for this ban. It isn't to avoid "being inundated with the Californian Elite's warped ideas/ideological doctrine." It seems more in line with the Modi government's attempts to clamp down on dissent in India. For instance, it's been censoring tweets critical of its handling of the pandemic.

Besides, free expression is protected by the Indian constitution, so it's hardly for the government to decide whether Indians buy into "the Californian Elite's warped ideas."

[iudqnolq]

What's something bad Netanyahu has done that Modi hasn't?