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The Congress on Wednesday said dictatorial regimes would blush at the brazenness with which the Narendra Modi government was trying to crush citizens freedom by enforcing new rules for social media that have invited allegations of political censorship.

Messaging platforms will be required to provide access to encrypted messages, which would break privacy protections. On Wednesday, WhatsApp filed a lawsuit in Delhi High Court challenging the new digital rules.

According to the new rules, the three-month deadline for compliance with which ended on Wednesday, social media platforms operating in India would have to appoint a resident grievance officer, a chief compliance officer and a nodal contact person. The rules require large social media platforms those with more than 50 lakh registered users such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to do additional due diligence. The platforms will also now be required to have a physical contact address in India.

Arguing that the Modi government should be the new go-to place for all dictators to hone their skills in controlling free speech and thought, Congress spokesperson and constitutional lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi said the new rules struck at the concept of encryption, which is the technological backbone of privacy.

This is particularly true of messaging apps, the most important subset of social media and digital platforms, he said.

Singhvi said the committee that would monitor content would become the Big Daddy of control, acting like social media police, a digital thana working under the information technology ministry.

His argument was that giving such powers to a regime that slapped sedition charges on people speaking about oxygen crisis during the pandemic, arrested people for putting up posters critical of the Prime Minister and hauled up journalists for negative coverage would strangulate free speech.

Lamenting that the government had refused to modify the rules despite unanimous condemnation from all segments of civil and political society, Singhvi said: The heart and soul of their highly objectionable approach was reflected in Rule 4, which obliges all social media platforms to identify the first originator of the information (in a message) if so directed by the government.

This introduces the requirement of traceability that would break end-to-end encryption. It should be noted that even previous proposals that seek to implement traceability in a manner which is supposedly compatible with end-to-end encryption have been shown to be vulnerable to spoofing where bad actors can falsely modify the originator information to frame an innocent person.

Singhvi said the grounds for such directions had deliberately been kept vague. The rules says that the government may ask social media platforms for the originator of a message for the purposes of prevention, detection, investigation, prosecution or punishment of an offence related to the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order.

Singhvi said: Under Clause 3 (d), all platforms have to remove any content deemed objectionable by an application, not by any court, but by the ministry (with) such broad thresholds. Under Clause 3(b) (i), the government can command the platform to remove any data on the basis of such utterly broad words like belongs to another person and to which the user does not have any right. WhatsApp forwards of research or analysis to groups could be stopped under this deliberately overbroad definition.

Pointing out that countless sedition cases had been initiated against citizens for criticising the Prime Minister, Singhvi said: Any infraction of the rules would take away the protection given by the parent act, which exempts the intermediary social media platforms from direct punishment and consequently, any mischievous application would directly make the social media platform liable for third-party content over which they have no control. The government has forgotten all the safeguards and protections accorded to social media in the landmark Shreya Singhal case.

The Congress leader asserted that the rules also violate the principles of privacy elaborated in the Puttaswamy judgment of a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court in 2017. The court had held that the right to privacy is protected as a fundamental right under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution.

If this Big Daddy does not agree with the self-regulation done by the social media platform itself at Level-1 or disagrees with the decision of the self-regulation institutional body at Level-2, Rules 13 and 14 allow an inter-departmental government committee to make recommendations overruling the Level-1 and Level-2 decisions, exercising direct content censorship and empowering itself to direct that content of any person or sender or publisher to be blocked, Singhvi said.

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Congress: Modi government trying to crush citizens freedom - Telegraph India

The officers from Indias elite antiterrorism police unit descended after dusk on the New Delhi offices of Twitter, with television news cameras in tow. Their mission: Start an argument over fake news.

The offices sat empty, closed amid Indias devastating coronavirus outbreak. And the police acknowledged that they were there to deliver nothing more legally binding than a notice disputing a warning label that Twitter had assigned to some tweets.

But symbolically, the visit by the police on Monday night sent a clear message that Indias powerful ruling party is becoming increasingly upset with Twitter because of the perception that the company has sided with critics of the government. As anger has risen across the country over Indias stumbling response to the pandemic, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party have struggled to control the narrative.

As a result, top Indian political leaders have applied increasing pressure on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms that people are using to air their complaints. In doing so, they are following the path of some other countries trying to control how and where messages can spread on social media. In March, for example, the Russian government said it would slow access to Twitter, one of the few places where Russians openly criticize the government.

The police visit illustrates the extent to which state machinery can be instrumentalized by the party in power to curb opposing voices and mishandle the opposition, said Gilles Verniers, a professor of political science at Ashoka University near New Delhi.

Regardless of the clumsy manner in which it was conducted, this raid is an escalation in the stifling of domestic criticism in India, he said.

For example, the police visit was set off by labels that Twitter applied to tweets posted by senior members of the party, called the B.J.P.

Party leaders posted documents that they called irrefutable proof that opposition politicians had planned to use Indias stumbling coronavirus response to tar Mr. Modi and Indias reputation itself.

But Twitter undercut that campaign when it labeled the posts manipulated media. Indian disinformation watchdog groups had said the documents were forged.

In going after Twitter, the B.J.P. focused on one of the main ways people in India pleaded for help as infections began to soar in April and people began to die by the thousands per day. Hospital beds, medicine and supplemental oxygen became precious commodities. Online networks sprang up on Twitter and other social media platforms for volunteers to connect desperate patients with supplies.

The second wave of the coronavirus reached a peak on May 6 414,188 fresh infections. Since then, cases have fallen by nearly half, but the overall death toll, 303,720, continues to rise.

The B.J.P. is no slouch at social media. Under Mr. Modi, it has used social media to spectacular effect, pushing its Hindu nationalist agenda to far corners of the country and to denigrate its opponents.

But as dissenting voices rise, and the B.J.P.s tolerance for dissent grows short, it has used harsher tactics to rein the platforms in.

This month, the government ordered social media platforms, including Twitter, to take down dozens of posts critical of the governments handling of the pandemic.

In February, as a farmer-led protest against agriculture changes captured the public imagination, the company acquiesced to government demands and blocked the accounts of 500 people accused of making inflammatory remarks about Mr. Modi.

Last summer, India banned TikTok, WeChat and dozens of other Chinese apps, citing national security concerns.

Though Mr. Modis government controls the Delhi police, it was not clear on Tuesday that the failed mission at the Twitter office had happened at its behest.

Understand the Covid Crisis in India

A B.J.P. spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Twitter spokeswoman asked for questions in an email, which went unanswered.

On May 18, a B.J.P. spokesman, Sambit Patra, tweeted the picture of a document he described as plans by the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, for making the government look bad.

Mr. Patras message was retweeted more than 5,000 times, including by ministers in Mr. Modis government and party leaders.

Harsh Vardhan, Indias health minister, used the hashtag #CongressToolkitExposed to rip into the opposition party.

Its deplorable on their part to attempt to spread misinformation during this global catastrophe just to swell their dwindling political fortunes at the expense of peoples suffering, Dr. Vardhan tweeted.

Except that the plans were fake, doctored on old letterhead, said independent fact-checking organizations and the Congress Party, which filed a police report against Mr. Patra and another B.J.P. leader. Last Thursday, Twitter stepped in, labeling the tweet manipulated media and provoking the ire of government supporters who demanded that the Indian government ban the company.

Many blame the disaster that India is experiencing now on government hubris. While cases were rising in March, Mr. Modi was campaigning for state elections. His government signed off on a religious festival that drew millions of Hindus to the Ganges River banks.

Mr. Modi, who gave regular, rousing national addresses during the first wave of cases, has become less visible during the second wave. Many Indians feel abandoned. With local pandemic lockdowns still in place, rather than take to the streets, protesters are confined to social media.

That space is becoming ever smaller, digital rights advocates and public interest lawyers said.

Last month, while the number of virus infections and deaths skyrocketed, at least 25 people were arrested after hanging posters in Delhi that questioned Indias decision to export vaccines abroad.

The posters were made by the ruling party in Delhi, another party in opposition to the B.J.P., according to a party member, Durgesh Pathak.

In a democracy, to ask a question is not wrong, Mr. Pathak said. I am not abusing anybody. I am not instigating anybody for violence. I am not asking anybody to do any wrong thing. I am asking a question to the prime minister of my country.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

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Indian Police Visit Twitter Offices as Modi Goes on Pandemic Offense - The New York Times

Facebook and Instagram will give users the choice to hide Like counts on their own posts as well as others posts that appear in their feeds, the company announced on Wednesday.

The move comes after years of criticism that Facebooks platforms and particularly Instagram, which Facebook owns fuel a pressurized and toxic social media environment that damages peoples mental health and body image. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a call with reporters that surveys showed the well-being of users didnt change when Like counts were removed and that people didnt use the app less or more. I think we had a sense that we were going to lose users, Mosseri explained. It doesnt look like we are going to.

Users will now have a bit more control over when they see Like counts, but the new features do not represent a major change in how these social networks actually work. Instead, Facebook and Instagram are pushing the decision over how Likes are handled to users themselves, which amounts to another example of how Facebook tends to deflect responsibility for its platforms worst impulses and impacts onto users while making promises of more choice.

The new Like count feature is rolling out on Instagram and Facebook starting today. On Instagram, this means that users will now be able to go into the apps settings and turn off Like counts on other peoples posts. To do this in the app, go to Settings > Posts, where youll see a toggle that, when switched on, hides the Like counts viewable on posts from other people that show up in your feed. The default setting is that Likes are visible, so again, users will have to go into the app and proactively change the setting if they want to discontinue seeing Likes..

Users can also ensure that other people cant see the total number of Likes on their own posts. But thats a little bit harder to do: It doesnt appear that users can hide Likes on all their posts by default. Instead, they have to decide whether Likes should be visible for every single post and proactively turn them off.

Its important to note that the underlying metrics that power Instagram arent changing. Likes and data generated by Like-based activity arent going away, and users will still be able to view how many Likes their own posts are getting, even if theyve hidden those numbers from others. Other metrics on Instagram also remain visible to users, including Instagram story views, the number of comments on posts, and follower counts. Mosseri told reporters that leaving the Like count feature intact but making users decide whether or not to see it allowed the company to reconcile those who value Like counts with those who dont.

You mightve seen that weve been testing different options for a while and this update reflects the feedback weve gotten, Mosseri said in a tweet on Wednesday. We want you to feel good about the time you spend on our apps and this is a way to give you more control over your experience.

Notably, Likes can be a valued source of information for influencers and creators who use the platform regularly.

I see this as a slick decision on the part of Facebook to put the onus of metric visibility on its users; it allows them to shore up what seems to be a superficial commitment to users mental health while allowing creators to continue to drive users and hence data to their platforms, Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor of communications who has studied social media, told Recode in an email. Duffy added that Facebooks decision to leave the choice up to individual users seems like an effort to appease creators and influencers, as well as everyday users, without changing Facebooks core model.

Ultimately, even Mosseri admitted that theres evidence that these changes will not do much to improve users mental health. Instagram has been testing different approaches to the Like feature since 2019 and has said its own studies found that the feature tweak had mixed results.

Some think platforms like Instagram need to look at changes beyond individual tools and features that users must find and change themselves. As Vox reporter Rebecca Jennings wrote in 2019, While generally put forth with positive intentions, these overdue measures ignore the fact that no matter how much Instagram would like to be viewed as a place users feel good about visiting, its entire existence is predicated on reminding people that other people are having more fun than they are.

And despite calls for reforms, its not clear that major, fundamental changes to Facebook and Instagram are coming anytime soon. We should still expect these social networks to continue making incremental changes and adjustments to features, providing users with more options rather than more structural reforms of these platforms. History indicates that this is how Facebook is likely to approach problems.

In March, for example, Facebook published a somewhat wonky Feed Filter feature to allow users to decide for themselves whether they want to see an algorithmically curated or reverse-chronological News Feed, while also insisting that Facebook the company is not particularly responsible for political polarization and extreme content. Other new tools meant to give users a semblance of control include a Favorites Feed, which is meant to allow users to curate their own News Feeds, and a choose who can comment feature, which users are meant to take advantage of to limit potentially unwanted interactions.

None of these features are necessarily bad, but they contribute to the troubling trend: Facebook responds to its toughest structural issues by making small tweaks to the user experience or to specific settings. And then its up to users to tweak those settings and adjust how they use the platform with the hope that, somehow, the bad aspects of Facebook will just go away.

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Facebook and Instagram will let you hide Likes: How the new feature works - Vox.com

Prince Harry said the media is "desperately trying to control the narrative" about him and Meghan Markle in "The Me You Can't See."

Harry co-created and executive produced the docuseries about mental health alongside Oprah Winfrey for Apple TV+.

In episode five, Winfrey and Harry discussed his and Markle's bombshell interview, during which the couple revealed that the royal family didn't help Markle as she struggled with suicidal thoughts and that a member of the royal family made racist comments about Archie's skin.

She asked Harry if he still "feels controlled" by the media since their interview. The Duke of Sussex said no, adding that he thinks the media is still trying to control the story.

"They're desperately trying to control the narrative because they know that if they lose it, then the truth will come out," he told her. Harry did not specify what truth he was referring to.

The duke then discussed his and Markle's intentions going into the interview with Winfrey.

"The interview was about being real, being authentic, and hopefully sharing an experience we know is incredibly relatable to a lot of people around the world, despite our unique, privileged position," Harry said.

"I like to think we were able to speak the truth in the most compassionate way possible, therefore leaving an opening for reconciliation and healing," he added.

It seemed as though Prince William and Harry made steps towards reconciliation at Prince Philip's funeral, but Princess Diana's biographer warned that it will be some time before the brothers have peace between them.

In "The Me You Can't See," the duke also said that the media and the "firm" worked against Markle together, which contributed to her mental-health issues.

"Before the interview, because of their headlines and that combined effort of the firm and the media to smear her, I was woken up in the middle of the night to her crying in her pillow because she doesn't want to wake me up because I'm already carrying too much," Harry said of Markle. "That's heartbreaking."

Harry went on to credit therapy with helping him and Markle handle the difficulties they've faced since becoming a couple.

"Therapy has equipped me to be able to take on anything," he said. "That's why I'm here now. That's why my wife is here now. Without therapy and without doing the work, we would not be able to withstand this."

In an earlier episode of the series, Harry revealed that Markle helped him realize he needed therapy.

The duke also said that stepping back from the royal family and moving to Los Angeles was "scary," but that he doesn't have regrets about the decision because it's improved his mental health.

"Making this move was really scary," he said. "At every possible opportunity, the forces that were working against us tried to make it impossible."

"I have no regrets. It's incredibly sad, but I have no regrets at all because now I'm in a place where I feel as though I should have been four years ago," he went on to say, adding that his anxiety has decreased since the change.

"I'm now more comfortable in my own skin. I don't get panic attacks. I have learned more about myself in the last four years than I have in the 32 years before that," Harry said. "I have my wife to thank for that."

"The Me You Can't See" is available for streaming on Apple TV+.

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Prince Harry says media 'desperately trying to control the narrative' - Insider

Spencer Platt / Getty Images May Day March Takes Place In New York City

Watch the CBSN Originals documentary, "Speaking Frankly | Socialism," in the video player above.

Socialism: It's a buzzword in the 2020 election season, having sprung up dozens of times during campaign, particularly during the Republication National Convention. Conservative leaders depict the idea as a democracy-killing bogeyman. Some Democrats including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have embraced the label with gusto.

CBSN Originals presents "Speaking Frankly | Socialism"

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The political philosophy has history going back centuries. Directly or otherwise, it has influenced government policies around the world, including in America.

But what exactly does socialism mean? What do socialists want right now? And is the Republican warning that socialism is threatening to destroy the American way of life a real concern? There are some facts about socialism that are beyond dispute.

At its simplest, socialism calls for a nation's citizens to control at least some of its means of production the major ingredients needed for a healthy economy. Think infrastructure, energy, natural resources. Under socialism, any surplus or profit from those sectors must benefit those same citizens. Capitalism, meanwhile, calls for private owners to control the means of production and to keep any profit they make for themselves.

Many Americans see these two systems as opposites and Republicans, in particular, tend to view it as an either-or situation. In a recent Pew Research Centersurvey, the majority of Republicans (68%) expressed a positive view of capitalism and a negative view of socialism.

But a substantial minority of voters hold a positive view of both systems 25% of the overall group of Americans surveyed by Pew felt favorably about socialism as well as capitalism.

The fact is, the two systems can, and do, coexist in many countries. Some governments blend socialist policies with capitalism and democratically elected leadership, a system usually called social democracy.

No socialists are running for president on a major-party ticket in 2020. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party's nominees for president and vice president, are not socialists. They are not members of the current socialist party, called Socialist Party USA, or of the nation's biggest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has about 70,000 members nationwide.

Asked what he'd say to people who were worried about socialism, Biden told Wisconsin stationWLUK-TV: "I beat the socialists. That's how I got elected. That's how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career, my whole career. I am not a socialist."

Overall, socialism accounts for a small percentage of America's political makeup. Socialist Party USA had no members in any national or state office in 2020. Only about half a dozen DSA members have held federal office over the years, all in the U.S. House of Representatives, including the current Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib. Senator Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and has been supported by the DSA, but he is not a known member and does not run under the Socialist Party.

Republicans have frequently used the terms "socialism" and "socialist" as a threat or insult when referring to progressive candidates who are not actually socialists.

There have always been different types of socialists not to mention wildly varying ideas of what the "means of production" are, what role government should have, and where free enterprise might still fit in. Some socialists see "means of production" as all major industries, such as finance or energy.

For Jabari Brisport, a New York teacher and state senate candidate, "What [socialism] means is that energy, housing, health care, education, finance, and transportation ... shall be controlled publicly and not run by, for profit motive."

Other socialists have pushed for a total ban on private enterprise. Karl Marx, the Prussian intellectual who championed socialism in the 19th century, predicted that capitalism was doomed to fail, and a government-controlled economy would rise. Vladimir Lenin, whose Bolshevik revolution gave rise to the Soviet Union's communist regime, preferred armed struggle to help push capitalism into history's trash bin.

Today, the most prominent of America's socialists are very different from the Marxists of the past. They largely push for progressive reforms within capitalism a philosophy generally defined as social democracy.

The Democratic Socialists of America aims to blend socialism-inspired reforms with America's current free-enterprise system. The DSA does not believe private enterprise should be immediately overthrown in favor of a government-run economy. Instead, Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has pushed for a "revolution of working people at the ballot box" new laws and stronger unions to make private businesses more accountable to what DSA members see as public interests.

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, has advocated for universal free health care, canceling all student debt, and expanding Social Security benefits within America's free-market economy.

The Republican Party has made socialism or more specifically, warnings about socialism a part of its 2020 campaign messaging. During the Republican National Convention in August, one of the speakers, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, cast socialism as antithetical to the American Dream.

"If we let them, [Democrats] will turn our country into a socialist utopia, and history has taught us that path only leads to pain and misery, especially for hard-working people hoping to rise," Scott said.

During his nomination acceptance speech, Mr. Trump echoed that warning, calling Joe Biden a "Trojan horse for socialism."

Some of Biden's policy proposals do call for big spending; he has proposed a$2 trillion clean energy plan. But Biden has also rejected ideas that are darlings of the DSA, such as the Green New Deal. (President Trump, for his part, has also pushed for mega-spending on areas that could be seen as means of production including a $12 billionaid package for farmers.)

Opponents of socialism often point to Venezuela as a cautionary tale. Once ranked as the richest South American country thanks to its oil reserves, in 1998 Venezuela elected a socialist leader, Hugo Chvez. Chvez centralized power in his increasingly authoritarian grip and spent billions on social programs from profits on oil. Under Chvez's successor, Nicols Maduro, global oil prices plummeted and Venezuela's petroleum-dependent economy collapsed.

"It's just empty, empty shelves, all over," says Venezuela-born Maria Fernanda Bello, a coalition director for Young Americans Against Socialism. "Socialists are always going to promise you free tuition, free health care, free everything, but they will never promise you freedom."

But American socialists like Bernie Sanders reject the comparison.

"Let me be very clear: Anybody who does what Maduro does is a vicious tyrant," Sanders said at a 2019 Democratic primary debate. "To equate what goes on in Venezuela to what I believe is extremely unfair."

Some of America's most popular policies have been linked with socialism since their inception, whether the label was earned or not. When Social Security was first proposed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression, a suspicious senator asked the secretary of labor whether it counted as socialism. When told it did not, the senator responded, "Isn't this a teeny-weeny bit of socialism?"

American entrepreneurs have also taken advantage of programs that could be interpreted as socialism-lite.

Donald Trump's father, Fred, got his start building Depression-era homes for New York families with the help of the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insures home mortgages made by private lenders essentially bringing some control over America's finances under the power of its people, via the federal government. Later, Fred Trump turned to the FHA again, building agency-backed housing for military families. Donald Trump later inherited his father's fortune, built in part by these projects.

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What is socialism? And what do socialists really want in 2020?