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As thousands of people die each day, the Modi government is cracking down on people criticizing it online.

Posted on April 29, 2021, at 5:05 p.m. ET

A worker adjusts a funeral pyre of those who died from COVID-19 during a mass cremation at a crematorium in New Delhi on April 29, 2021.

India, a country with 1.4 billion people, has been gripped by a deadly second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. But even as its healthcare system gasps for breath and its crematoriums burn with thousands of funeral pyres, its leaders are scrambling to censor the internet.

Last week, Indias IT ministry ordered Twitter to block more than 50 tweets from being seen in the country. Days later, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times of India reported that Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube had also taken down posts that were critical of the government. Over the last week, ordinary people running WhatsApp and Telegram groups to help people find medical oxygen and hospital beds have complained of threats demanding that they shut them down, and police in the state of Uttar Pradesh filed a complaint against a man who asked for medical oxygen for his dying grandfather on Twitter, claiming that he was spreading misleading information. On Wednesday, posts with the hashtag #ResignModi disappeared from Facebook for a few hours. And even though the company restored it and claimed that the Indian government didnt ask for it to be censored, it didnt provide details about why the hashtag had been blocked.

These incidents which happened within days of each other as criticism of Indias government reached a fever pitch highlight the shrinking space for dissent in the worlds largest democracy. As social unrest against an increasingly authoritarian government grows, it has cracked down on social media, one of the last free spaces remaining for citizens to express their opinions. New regulations have given the government broad powers to restrict content, forcing US tech platforms, which count India as a key market, to strike a balance between growth and free expression.

This isnt the first time that an Indian government has attempted to censor speech online. In 2012, before Modi came to power, Indias United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government ordered internet service providers to block more than a dozen Twitter accounts, including those belonging to people from the right wing.

In February, Indias government ordered Twitter to take down more than 250 tweets that criticized how the government handled protests over new agricultural laws. Although Twitter blocked most of the accounts, it unblocked the ones belonging to journalists, activists, and politicians, despite jail threats from the Indian government.

Indias current internet censorship ties directly into social criticism of the governments policies.

But now, there is an increase in the frequency and scale of the censorship that is being demanded, Apar Gupta, director of digital rights organization Internet Freedom Foundation, told BuzzFeed News. Indias current internet censorship ties directly into social criticism of the governments policies.

Over the weekend, Indias IT ministry attempted to explain its reasoning in an unsigned Word document it shared with the press, and which was accessed by BuzzFeed News.

The [g]overnment welcomes criticisms, genuine requests for help as well as suggestions in the collective fight against COVID19, the note said. But it is necessary to take action against those users who are misusing social media during this grave humanitarian crisis for unethical purposes.

The ministry cited a handful of the 53 tweets that it ordered to be blocked as examples of problematic content. There are four tweets that call the coronavirus pandemic a conspiracy theory, and four more containing old and unrelated visuals of patients and dead bodies. At least two of these four instances are genuine examples of misinformation, fact-checkers from Indian outlets Alt News and Newschecker who examined the images told BuzzFeed News.

In an example of how thin the line between removing dangerous rumors and censoring political expression can be, the ministry offered no explanations for any other content ordered down. A BuzzFeed News examination of the rest of the restricted tweets showed that at least some of them appeared to make legitimate criticisms of Indias prime minister. One of the restricted tweets, for instance, belongs to Moloy Ghatak, a minister from the state of West Bengal. He accuses Modi of mismanaging the pandemic and exporting vaccines when theres a shortage in India.

Neither Ghatak nor the IT ministry responded to requests for comment

One of the tweets restricted in India belonged to Pawan Khera, a national spokesperson of the Indian National Congress, Indias main opposition party. The tweet, which was posted on April 12, shows pictures from the Kumbh Mela, a religious Hindu gathering held earlier this month during which millions of people bathed in a river even as coronavirus cases were rapidly rising. Both ordinary Indians and the global press have criticized Indias government for allowing the gathering to happen. In his tweet, Khera contrasts Indias lack of reaction to the Kumbh Mela with an incident last year, when members of a Muslim gathering were accused of spreading the coronavirus when the country had fewer than 1,000 confirmed cases.

Why was my tweet withheld? Khera told BuzzFeed News. Thats the answer I need from the government of India.

What laws am I violating? What rumors am I spreading? Where did I cause panic? These are the questions I need answered, said Khera, who sent a legal request to the IT ministry and Twitter this week.

If I dont hear back from them, Ill take them to court.

If I dont hear back from them, Ill take them to court, he said. I need legal relief to protect my freedom of expression.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Experts said the ministrys note didnt provide sufficient justification for ordering social media platforms to censor posts. Since when did the government start sending takedown notices for misinformation? asked Pratik Sinha, editor of Alt News. And why have just these tweets been cited [out of 53]?

Social media platforms havent been the only places seeing a crackdown. Over the last few weeks, volunteer-run networks of WhatsApp and Telegram groups amplifying pleas for help, and getting people access to medical oxygen, lifesaving drugs, and hospital beds have sprung up around the country. But over the last few days, some of them have disbanded. According to a report on Indian news website the Quint, volunteers running these groups received calls from people claiming to be from the Delhi Police asking them to shut them down.

The Delhi Police denied this, but by then, people were spooked. A network of WhatsApp groups run by more than 300 volunteers disbanded days ago even though they didnt get a call. We decided not to take a chance, the founder of this group, who wished to remain anonymous, told BuzzFeed News. [I felt] frustration and anger.

Experts said one of the biggest problems in this situation is a lack of transparency from both the government and the platforms. Last week, Twitter revealed the details of the IT ministrys order on Lumen, a Harvard University database that lets companies disclose takedown notices from governments around the world. But Facebook, Instagram, and Google havent commented on alleged censorship in one of their largest markets, either to the public or to BuzzFeed News when asked.

They didnt even put out a public statement about this, said the Internet Freedom Foundations Gupta. The primary duty of transparency lies with the government, but there has been absolutely no transparency by the platforms.

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COVID-19 Is Devastating India. Its Government Is Trying To Censor Social Media. - BuzzFeed News

A legal battle about whether a 2018 constitutional amendment known as Marsys Law can shield the identities of police officers went to the Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The city of Tallahassee filed a notice that is a first step in asking the Supreme Court to decide whether the constitutional amendment, which is designed to bolster crime victims rights, can apply to police officers who were threatened in use-of-force incidents.

A three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal last month sided with two Tallahassee police officers, who argued that, as victims, they were entitled to privacy protections included in Marsys Law.

The decision came in a lawsuit filed against the city by the Florida Police Benevolent Association, which represents the police officers, who are identified in court documents as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2.

As is common, the citys notice of taking the issue to the Supreme Court did not provide detailed legal arguments. But a statement issued last week by City Attorney Cassandra Jackson said the case is one of great public importance to the state of Florida in its appellate level interpretation of Marsys Law.

With respect for the (appellate) courts opinion and appreciation of the difficult work performed by police officers every day, the decision has far-reaching implications related to public transparency and is deserving of final review by Floridas highest court, Jackson said in the statement.

The lawsuit is the first major test of whether Marsys Law conflicts with a decades-old government-in-the-sunshine amendment that enshrined in the Florida Constitution some of the nations broadest public-records laws.

Marsys Law addresses a series of issues related to victims rights, including offering privacy protections. Nearly 62 percent of voters approved the measure in 2018.

In the April 6 appellate-court decision, Judge Lori Rowe wrote that nothing in Marsys Law excludes law enforcement officers --- or other government employees --- from the protections granted crime victims.

Rowe, joined by Judges Timothy Osterhaus and Robert Long, wrote that a police officer meets the definition of a crime victim under Marsys Law when a crime suspect threatens the officer with deadly force, placing the officer in fear for his life.

The two police officers in the case were involved in separate use-of-force incidents. In an incident that drew national attention, John Doe 2 shot a Black transgender man last May. Because the police officer was the victim of an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in the incident involving Natosha Tony McDade, the Police Benevolent Association said he had the right to invoke the privacy privilege provided by Marsys Law.

The First Amendment Foundation, the Florida Press Association and a number of media outlets intervened in the lawsuit, arguing that allowing Marsys Law to apply to law-enforcement officers would undercut the states open-records laws.

The appellate ruling reversed a decision by then-Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dodson, who in July found that the explicit language of Marsys Law was not intended to apply to law enforcement officers when acting in their official capacity.

Dodson said the case involved balancing victims rights with the publics right to hold government accountable by inspecting public records and ordered the city to release the names of the two police officers.

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Battle Over Shielding Identities Of Police Officers Headed To Supreme Court - WUSF News

Lisa Graves| Guest Columnist

On April 26, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could unmoor decades of transparency laws, even as dark money spending by special interests continues to rise.

The courts new majority is being asked by billionaire Charles Kochs nonprofits to expand on the notion that money is speech by ruling that the First Amendment bars disclosure laws that may chill large donors from giving more money to nonprofits.

On the surface, the case, known as Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, is about whether a state can require a nonprofit group to reveal a list of its donors who give $5,000 or more. That data is not public, but a glitch in Californias electronic filing system inadvertently made it searchable to other filers for a short period, which Kochs Americans for Prosperity Foundation discovered.

The rule requiring secret disclosure has been followed in millions of nonprofit filings since 1970. There is no evidence it was misused or abused by regulators or others, and the California flaw was fixed.

But that was not good enough for Kochs Americans for Prosperity, which apparently had been refusing to provide that data to California anyway, even though it was required by the Internal Revenue Service on Schedule B of their annual tax filings. The IRS has allowed nonprofits to redact the names but requires public disclosure of the largest amounts.

This rule is the only reason we know, for example, that a group called the Wellspring Committee received almost all of its funding, more than $28 million, from a single donor after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016. The donors identity remains unknown.

Between 2016-17, Wellspring gave a total of $38 million to a group called the Judicial Crisis Network, which spent millions to pressure the Senate to block President Barack Obamas nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, and then to push for the confirmation of President Donald Trumps nominee to that seat, Neil Gorsuch. After spending additional millions to help get Brett Kavanaugh confirmed, Wellspring closed.

The case before the Supreme Court continues Kochs assault on even minimal transparency and oversight of nonprofits, which became increasingly involved in elections after the controversial Citizens United ruling in 2010.

Since then, Koch has helped raise and spend more than a billion dollars to influence elections, but the donors are kept hidden. That is why spending through such groups, like Americans for Prosperity, is so robust. Unlike money donated directly to a candidate or political party, which must be disclosed, donations to groups like Americans for Prosperity are secret.

In fact, we do not even know how much Koch himself or Koch Industries has spent, due to Sen. Mitch McConnells blocking of disclosure bills.

Americans for Prosperity has taken credit for spending millions to help GOP candidates win elections and to get Trump-appointed judges confirmed. That includes helping Amy Coney Barrett get confirmed right before the 2020 election, which is why Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and others asked that she recuse herself from hearing the case. Barrett refused.

But now, Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are poised to aid the agenda of the dark money groups that helped sweep them onto the Supreme Court. They may even strike a fatal blow against disclosure laws, like HR 1, the For the People Act, which would shine a light on billionaires like Koch who have secretly spent untold millions to influence elections.

This is the wrong way to go. Our democracy desperately needs more sunshine, not more darkness.

Lisa Graves is the executive director of True North Research and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. This column was produced for The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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Dont open the door further to dark money: Our democracy needs more sunshine - Milford Daily News

This story originally appeared on LX.com

It may be hard to picture today, but the Internet was originally conceived as a decentralized network of computers. Today web servers have been largely consolidated into the hands of five multi-billion-dollar corporations: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook. Yet there are several strong arguments for returning the Internet back to what its developers intended.

Each day, humans create around 2.5 EB [exabytes] of data as a byproduct of using the web roughly the size of one trillion iPhone photos and right now, most of it belongs to a handful of tech corporations. Sometimes web data is a key component to improving an app. Other times its the missing variable in an algorithm that organizes a social media feed. The current centralized web concentrates our user data on a handful of corporate servers; a decentralized web is designed to keep user data private.

In 2019, China's Ministry of Public Service blocked news accounts of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and in 2021, news of director Chloe Zhaos oscar win was censored on Chinese search engines and social media. Chinese citizens arent free to decide what content to read and watch online. A decentralized web is difficult to censor, because instead of blocking a single server, governments would need to block access to every node on the network. With a large enough network, that could be nearly impossible.

Of course if Internet infrastructure [cable and fiber lines] is centrally owned and managed, a regime could simply cut the fiber line. True decentralization isnt possible until the communications layer of the web, the network infrastructure, is no longer centrally managed.

With demand for web services growing, data centers are likely to grow accordingly. The current centralized web uses large data centers and some of these are less efficient than others. One aspect of decentralization, autonomy, could help reduce the webs carbon footprint.

ThreeFold is one blockchain project building a decentralized web. Developers say ThreeFolds network architecture creates a carbon-neutral, energy efficient Internet by replacing network engineers with automation; describing ThreeFolds peer-to-peer web as self healing and requiring zero people to maintain it.

It might seem strange to Americans reading this online, but the web is not widely available around the planet. If you have the web, you have an advantage. Information, goods and services are more available to communities with web access. This creates a loop where privilege enables more privilege, keeping offline communities at a disadvantage.

Fiber networks are expensive to install and not profitable for large corporations working in underprivileged countries. A decentralized web owned and operated by the people of any given community could provide opportunity to people living in areas without Internet access. Running the web from network nodes instead of a central access point reduces the cost of Internet infrastructure and could bring commerce and education to people who need it.

The networks that deliver the web are centrally owned and managed. Large telecoms bring fiber-optic networks to millions of Americans. OpenSecrets.org says in 2020, the top two telecoms in the US, AT&T and Verizon, spent $22 million influencing lawmakers on topics ranging fromprivacy to net neutrality. Right now, the web is controlled by corporate authorities who court lawmakers with money in efforts to alter our web and this happens without your consent.

In 2014, Facebook conducted a news feed experiment, manipulating algorithms to see if it had an emotional effect on people. The study was criticized by members of the National Academy of Sciences for not obtaining informed consent from people before subjecting them to experimentation. In 2018, a former Cambridge Analytica employee released documents detailing how the firm took user data from Facebook, and used it to create targeted political ads. Political campaigns have used data like this to stack our online feeds with content designed to influence our thoughts and actions including our votes.

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Censorship Battle Just One Critical Reason to Decentralize the Web - NBC Chicago

Netflix is aiming for a 20-fold increase in subscribers in India, but its journey in the nation has been bumpy. And now its getting a lot bumpier.

The Covid-19 crisis has forced film and TV production in Mumbaithe home of Bollywoodto shut down. According to Variety, Netflixs local productions are not only shut down in Mumbai, but also in Delhi and Lucknow. The company revealed on an earnings call this month that its back up and running safely in every country in the world except India and Brazil (pdf).

The shutdowns, of unknown duration, will thwart the momentum Netflix had been starting to build in India with its homegrown productions. Covid-19 wont last forever, and Bollywood will return to production eventually. Netflixs opportunity in India is immense, and the company is still committed to seeing it through. It just might take a lot longer than it planned.

Netflix is so interested in India because the movie-loving country (it produces 2,000 films per yearmore than the US) represents perhaps its biggest single-market opportunity since it started producing original content in 2015.

India is the worlds fastest growing streaming market, according to a 2020 report by PwC. Half of the countrys 1.4 billion peopleare under the age of 25, and by 2022, India is expected to have more than 800 million smartphone users. Netflixs expansion in India is part of a broader push throughout Asia, which has served as the source of much of the services subscription growth in the last few years.

The streaming service launched in the country in 2016, catering mostly to affluent, English-speaking consumers. It initially struggled to compete with cheaper entertainment options from the likes of Amazon, a brand thats long been popular with consumers in India, and Hotstar, which is now owned by Disney and was integrated into Disneys own streaming service, Disney+, last year.

In 2018, Netflix adjusted its India strategy to meet its bold vision. It invested more in local productions, offered a cheaper mobile-only plan (which the company said had better retention than it anticipated), and partnered with existing distributors like Reliance Jio to bring the service to new demographics. It also added Hindi to its interface and committed to more local-language productions, like the crime series Sacred Games, which debuted in 2018 and remains Netflixs most popular Indian show to date.

As of December, Netflix had about 5 million subscribers in Indiawell short of its 100 million goal. Executives have admitted they will continue to experiment with the strategy. India, were still figuring things out, Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings said on the companys most recent earnings call. And so that investment takes some guts and forward-looking belief. This year, Netflix plans more than 40 original Indian movies and TV showssignificantly more than its output in most places outside North America.

But Netflix cant really afford to turn off thespigot of content it opened in India in 2018. Because the Netflix brand is not as well-known to many Indian consumers as some of its competitors, the company has tried to stay fresh in viewers minds with lots of new contentat least a few of which, the company hopes, will be hits, like Sacred Games. Throughout the pandemic, its done a very good job engaging its users in India.

The indefinite pause in production, however, will likely reduce the amount of new content Netflix subscribers in India see, and thus lessen the chances of a breakout cultural phenomenon. In the US, Netflixs subscription growth has slowed, which the company attributes directly to production pauses causing a lighter than usual slate of content.

Netflix has already nearly saturated the US market, so three months with weak content in the country wont be devastating. But, in India, a similar light slate could set the company back a long time in its quest to reach 100 million, especially when its competitors have such widespread recognition. Hotstar, for instance, is operated by the media conglomerate Star India, whose networks are in 90% of pay-TV homes in India.

Whenever Netflix does return to production in India, it will face much greater government scrutiny than when it first entered the country in 2016.

After shows like Sacred Games were accused of being vulgar by politicians aligned with prime minister Narendra Modi, Netflix and other streaming services began self-censoring some content, with the hopes of avoiding controversy and staving off regulation. Modis government has since changed the regulatory agency under which streaming companies operate, largely seen as an attempt to start clamping down on content on services like Netflix.

Such regulations could have a chilling effect on the thriving creative community in Bollywood. A number of filmmakers and actors in India told CNN last month that they are now walking on egg shells, worried not only that many of the countrys most provocative projects wont get off the ground now, but also that they could face jail time for just doing their jobs. Netflix in particular could struggle to replicate the success of Sacred Games in this stifling environment.

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Netflix's big plans in India may be slowed by Covid and censorship - Quartz