Governments incompetence and stealth create confusion in overdue debate on regulation of social media The government was clearly caught unprepared by the rumour campaign threatening violence against people from the Northeast. Experts have warned of such attacks for years. The governments response is seen as authoritarian,arbitrary and illiterate,and the backlash in favour of free speech has prolonged the issue and increased the damage. Things have come to a pretty pass if Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi can pose as an aggrieved fanboy of free speech by flamboyantly blacking out his image in his Twitter account. The rumour campaign,and the uproar that followed,mark the end of innocence about free speech. It signals that traditional knee-jerk responses no longer suffice. Both the governments instinct to curb dissent and lampoons and the free-speech advocates determination to resist all controls,even self-control,are out of date. While the right of the government to censor communications in times of crisis is not seriously contested,the episode suggests that our internet nannies need to be better educated about the medium. Its ethos values freedom,transparency and discussion over all else. The path of least resistance is for censorship decisions to be left to specialists nominated by the government and acceptable to the people,rather than faceless bureaucrats. The process should be transparent and discussion should be allowed,perhaps using designated internet fora as public,self-governing courts of appeal. Instead,a cocktail of incompetence and stealth have created a miasma of confusion in which suspicions of motivated over-regulation have flourished. There would have been nothing to speculate about if the government had published a list of blocked Twitter handles. Disclosure would also have forced the government to think twice about arbitrarily blocking parody accounts and people with right-wing sympathies,which has made it look like it is bumbling. And the crowning irony is that the government has nothing to say about the Twitter account of its own minister,Milind Deora,being blocked. A government that expects to lay down the law on hate speech has to play the part. It cannot be so inept.
