Dharmendra Jore: Let's join hands to kill social evil together

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The I&B Ministry's plan to set up a hub to monitor activity on social media has started a debate - should one's freedom of expression and right to privacy be considered unlimited until it does not infringe on similar rights that the constitution offers to other stakeholders in a democratic set-up? Another question that concerned citizens and the SC have been asking is if the government's plan of tapping the social media message would create a "surveillance state".

A three-member SC bench has asked the government to respond to its concern, while hearing a case filed by a Trinamool Congress legislator, Mahua Moitra. Social media is abuzz... Other than infringement of privacy, users fear inspector raaj in the name of fake news/information from the government when things in cyber space are not going the way the ruling dispensation wants.

Social media's upsurge, especially WhatsApp, has been a bane and a boon. Unlike conventional media, social media operates in many ways with substantial participation from unorganised individuals and organised agencies. The latter have advanced software platforms at their disposal to reach out to the target audience with specific information in different fields, such as product marketing and political campaigns.

We saw how the BJP used the social media in toppling the UPA in 2014. Following BJP's stupendous success, all other parties and their leaders and workers have found an easier and better tool in social media apparatus. The industry is booming like anything, as every sitting legislator, or an aspiring legislator who did not know what Twitter was all about sometime ago, has hired an expert to handle his/her account. Social media has become an extremely important vertical in the business of image-making, creating many more jobs in this particular sector.

'Law alone won't work'
Amid rising controversy, Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis made a sane and very emotional appeal to social media users at a workshop held for journalists, students and citizens in Nagpur last Friday. It was his first in-depth statement that dealt with a proposed regulation (he did not mention the hub mechanism, though) and the society's active role in checking the menace of fake news/information.

Fadnavis said we are going through a transitional phase in which every citizen has become a reporter and a photographer in an age of multimedia, whereas in the past, we communicated through established media platforms - newspapers, radio and television. He said a personal thought put on social media could be limited to oneself, but the information that one posts on social media platforms becomes a matter of public consumption the moment it is read and forwarded.

Information is public and must be scrutinised and crosschecked before being put into public domain, he said, adding that the society should develop its own "contemporary norms" to regulate information in order to curb fake news. Law alone can't help in this, he said.

The CM raised a question, endorsing the common sense that had prevailed during the workshop: "Can it be banned by law? We will have to see if the ban amounts to killing one's freedom of expression." But CM's endorsement came with a query: whether we shouldn't ensure the unlimited freedom of expression did not encroach upon that of the others. "Boundaries should not be breached; but it happens, and there begins the problem," he said.

Aren't citizens accountable?
While we accuse the government of making a sinister plan of watching and listening to our conversations, have we forgotten our own responsibility and accountability in our social media behaviour? It seems some of us have realised it and are working on it. We reported last week how several citizen groups have conducted a workshop for WhatsApp Groups' administrators. The mobile app firm has brought in some effective regulatory features that admins could use to filter out false information.

The debate has become more intense after a brutal mob lynching of five tribals in north Maharashtra's Rainpada village, where some videos (apparently from a citizen awareness campaign from a neighbouring country) were taken without any verification as authentic information on child kidnappers. Not only Rainpada, many other places across the country have witnessed such mob killings.

These sad incidents have given the government an opportunity to think of regulating social media, which is now taken as a mechanism for censorship. Opposition parties are worried, because the curb would affect them as well, if the information that they circulate is not deemed fit in the ruling party's interest. Political stakeholders have their own agendas that may not necessarily keep the people in mind, but there should be no denying that users can considerably control the social evil that social media has created for us. We may learn from our past generations, which behaved responsibly in eradicating social ills.

Dharmendra Jore is political editor, mid-day. He tweets @dharmendrajore Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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