Facebook doesn’t cause riots, Mr Sibal, people do

This week’s unintentional political humour came from Kapil Sibal, the honourable Union minister in charge of two vital ministries, communications & information technology and human resources development. The first ministry deals with the fast growing areas of telecommunications, and IT. Sibal’s mandate is to help them grow faster, better and in a manner that encourages better communications, cheaper telephony, investment in the IT sector, and to support the IT industry that has managed to power so much of India’s growth story outside its shores. The HRD ministry is in charge of both school & literacy and higher education. It is estimated that over half of India’s population is under 18, and this is the ministry that ensures that this young population is schooled and trained for employment. Two vital ministries with a lot of work to be done. But, Sibal is obviously superman. He has not only managed to conquer the work load in these two ministries, but he has also waded in to help his colleague in the home ministry, P Chidambaram, to help stop riots.

Apparently the good people of India, about 92% of whom have never been on the internet, get inflamed after seeing disparaging, inflammatory and defamatory comments on the internet and spontaneously burst into riots. Sibal, obviously being a good minister, wants to do his two bits to stop riots. To stop the spilling of innocent blood, Sibal hit upon a brilliant idea. People riot because they see offensive content on the internet. Their feelings are inflamed, and they go out and burn things. Therefore, the best way to prevent this is to ensure that inflammatory material never goes up on the internet, especially not on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  He requested officials from these companies to screen content before it was uploaded.

Essentially this means that every time you type update or hit enter on your Facebook or Twitter account, that update would go into moderation. A human interface, trained by Sibal’s HRD ministry, would look at status updates and decide whether it was ‘disparaging, inflammatory and defamatory.’ The person, who probably was turned down by a call centre for not having enough skills, would then take a judgement call on whether to approve or reject your update. This update could be a photograph, a note, a video, or simply a status update. There are 38 million people in India who have Facebook accounts, a third of the entire net population of India. Can you imagine the number of status, video and other updates?

There have been a number of pictures and notes floating around cyberspace — many authored anonymously — that could be considered to be adolescent, puerile, and in bad taste, possibly hurting religious sentiments and the egos of the rich and powerful. But, anonymity is not the problem here. Nor is it the content. Regular netizens do nothing about the ugliness that manifests itself in this form of expression. The problem is with those who react, and want the violence of their response to be mirrored by others.

Facebook updates, Youtube videos and Twitter hashtags do not cause riots. People do. The problem is that the people who cause riots not only get away with it but also end up in various political parties in positions of power. The internet did not cause partition, nor did it cause the riots that followed. It did not cause Indira Gandhi’s assassination nor did it orchestrate a violent reaction against Sikhs in Delhi in 1984. The net was not even around in its current state and form. The internet was but a fledgling entity when LK Advani undertook his rath yatra that culminated in the destruction of a mosque in Ayodhya. The riots that followed were not caused by status updates or Youtube videos. In 2002, India’s internet population was about a crore. This was the pre-social networking era. This did not prevent riots in Gujarat. The internet did not cause the Berlin Wall to fall, did not cause the Arabs to revolt, and did not win Advani the last elections. That was purely done by the people who accepted or rejected a particular ideology.
Riots are caused by individuals with an agenda. That agenda is not religious hurt or status updates, but the desire to grab power.

The solution is not censorship. It is putting people who cause riots in prison. It is boycotting individuals who preach hate. It is laughing at people who want to impose their own narrow world view on others. Maybe we should just screen politicians, instead of screening content.

— Harini Calamur is a media entrepreneur, writer, blogger, teacher, & the main slave to an imperious hound. She blogs at calamur.org/gargi and @calamur on Twitter