A BBC documentary highlights growing social media censorship in India

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Last weekend, the Indian government ordered YouTube to remove clips from a BBC documentary. It sent a similar order to Twitter, telling that platform to remove any tweets that featured links to those clips and pointing to more than fifty specific posts that had done so. The documentary, called India: The Modi Question, covers, in part, a series of violent riots in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. More than a thousand people died—most of them Muslims. The documentary features quotes from UK government correspondence that described the riots as having had “all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing” and held Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, “directly responsible.” Modi is now India’s prime minister.

According to the orders from India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the clips from the documentary and the tweets referring to them were to be removed under information technology laws that the Modi government implemented in 2021. According to one report, senior officials from different branches of the government reviewed the documentary and found it to be “an attempt to cast aspersions on the authority and credibility of the Supreme Court of India, sow divisions among various Indian communities, and make unsubstantiated allegations regarding the actions of foreign governments in India.” (The Supreme Court had previously cleared Modi of blame for the riots.) One official told The Hindu that the documentary undermined “the sovereignty and integrity of India” and had the potential to “adversely impact public order within the country.”

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India has several laws that give officials the authority to order information providers to remove or block access to content, including the Information Technology Act of 2000, which allows the government to block content “in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the State, and public order.” The additional law that the Modi government passed in 2021 bills itself as a “digital media ethics code” that requires social media platforms to take down content within thirty-six hours of receiving a government order, and to otherwise assist law enforcement agencies with their inquiries. Foreign social media companies are required to employ a local staffer who can handle such official requests. Some critics have referred to this as a “hostage-taking law,” on the grounds that these local employees could end up in prison should their employer refuse to play ball.

In February 2021, amid widespread protests sparked by new agricultural laws, Twitter took down more than five hundred accounts that had posted critical comments about Modi and the government; the company also used its “country withheld” feature, a geo-blocking tool, to hide tweets from users located in India. (They remained visible for users elsewhere.) At the time, Twitter said that it had refused to remove any accounts or tweets belonging to journalists, politicians, or activists because it believed that doing so “would violate their fundamental right to free expression.” And Twitter said that it was committed to maintaining a healthy conversation on its platform, insisting that “the tweets should flow”—a clear echo of language that the company used in 2011, after the Egyptian government shut off access to the internet during the Arab Spring uprising there.

In the 2021 case, Twitter initially refused the Indian government’s takedown requests before the company folded and complied. Last July, in a separate case, Twitter went further in its attempts to push back, suing the Indian government over a decree that forced the company to remove tweets and block a number of accounts, as I wrote for CJR at the time. (It wasn’t clear which tweets and accounts were in question because Indian law gags platforms from talking publicly about the orders they receive.) Twitter initially obeyed the order but then filed the suit, arguing that the government had interpreted the law too broadly, according to a report in the New York Times. The suit described the order as overbroad, arbitrary, and disproportionate; the content in question, Twitter argued, was either political commentary, criticism, or otherwise newsworthy, and therefore should not be removed. (The case, as far as I can tell, is ongoing.)

In 2021, Maddy Crowell wrote for CJR that the Modi government’s weaponization of Twitter had endangered a number of news publishers, not least Caravan, which Crowell (who once interned at Caravan) described as one of the few Indian media outlets that had “refused to fall under the sway of the government or its acolytes,” and which had become known for publishing hard-hitting investigations of those in power. One day, without warning, Twitter took down Caravan’s account, along with more than two hundred and fifty others. The government told Caravan that one of its tweets amounted to “malicious social media propaganda” that could “lead to creating turmoil and havoc in the minds of the public.”

As Paroma Soni reported for CJR, also in 2021, the rules under which a tweet may be considered inflammatory are now much broader in India than they had been in the past; tweets can be cited as “objectionable” or “seditious” if they contain dissent of any kind, Soni wrote, and criticism of sexual violence—when the perpetrators were Hindu—has also been branded as dissent. The government has given itself the power to remove any form of content it sees as “anti-national,” but the definition of that term is murky, Soni wrote. Now the government is reportedly considering new laws that would further extend its control over social media: according to Reuters, a draft proposal published recently would allow the government to order the removal of any information identified as “fake or false” by the government’s communications department or any other agency that has been officially authorized for fact-checking. The proposal, the Editors Guild of India said in a statement, “will stifle legitimate criticism of the government and will have an adverse impact on the ability of the press to hold governments to account.”

India isn’t the only country to have weaponized laws supposedly targeted at misinformation or offensive content against speech that the government dislikes. Vietnam and Pakistan already have so-called “fake news” rules that give their respective governments wide latitude to remove content, or force companies to do so, in the name of “public order and security.” Brazil and Poland are considering similar laws. Recently, the government of Turkey—where the increasingly authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is seeking reelection this year—pushed through a law that threatens lengthy jail terms for the authors of stories and social media posts that “spread information that is inaccurate” and create “fear” and “panic” in areas including “domestic and external security,” “public order,” and “public health.”

Twitter, of course, has changed hands since it sued the Indian government last year. Its new owner, Elon Musk, once called himself a “free-speech absolutist,” but, as I wrote recently, his behavior at Twitter so far has not reflected that ideal—and that was before being asked to stand up to any foreign governments. “There’s this deep tension in the way that Elon Musk has talked about how he’s going to run the platform,” Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford who researches online speech, told Time magazine for a story about Twitter’s “India problem” that predated the government’s censorship of the BBC documentary. “His proclamations about being a free-speech platform would suggest standing up to authoritarians, who are the biggest threat to free speech. But he has also said he will obey local laws—which, in many areas of the world, means being far more restrictive than Twitter’s current content moderation rules.” Since Musk’s takeover, Twitter has reportedly restored several Hindu-nationalist accounts known for posting hate speech directed at Muslims. This week, the platform complied with the Indian government’s request to take down links to the BBC documentary.

Social media is not the be-all and end-all of political speech, of course, nor is it the only focus of censorship in India. Modi’s government, indeed, seems willing to go to extraordinary lengths to stop people from watching the BBC documentary. On Tuesday, students in New Delhi tried to screen the program at a university. The government responded by cutting off the power.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced that it will soon reinstate Donald Trump’s accounts on both platforms, two years after he was kicked off in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post that “the public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying—the good, the bad and the ugly,” and that Meta deems safety risks associated with Trump’s presence on the platforms to have “sufficiently receded.” Clegg also insisted that Trump’s reinstatement will come with “guardrails,” and that he could face further suspensions or other limits on his accounts in the future—though, per CNN’s Oliver Darcy, he will still be allowed to rage-post about the 2020 election.
• Recently, the Times reported that—in spite of prior suggestions that it would snub mainstream networks as it organizes primary debates ahead of the 2024 presidential election—the Republican Party has been in early debate talks with a broad range of potential hosts, including CNN, a favorite target of media-bashing GOP officials. Now Semafor’s Shelby Talcott reports that party leaders want Republican presidential candidates to be “put to the test” with substantive policy questions following a midterm cycle in which candidates who appealed solely to right-wing media often flopped—though the party does still want conservative outlets to provide moderators for debates.
• Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire checked in with unionized journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who are still striking after walking off the job a hundred days ago, and who may have inspired similar recent walkouts at other titles after a long stretch without a newspaper strike in the US. Meanwhile, the NewsGuild-CWA, a national media union, asked federal antitrust enforcers to investigate after Block Communications, the family-run company that owns the Post-Gazette, agreed to acquire the Pittsburgh City Paper—a rival alt-weekly that has aggressively covered the Blocks—via a subsidiary.
• Yesterday saw the launch of The Dial, a new monthly magazine that promises to “publish original reporting and literature organized around a pressing subject or question” and also to run content in translation, “bringing new and celebrated voices from beyond the Anglosphere to our readers.” The Dial’s first issue, titled “Egg,” focuses “on the global fight for bodily autonomy and reproductive justice” and features dispatches from Buenos Aires, Warsaw, and Istanbul, as well as poetry translated from Korean.
• And Margaret Sullivan, who stepped down last year as the media critic at the Washington Post, is joining the US edition of The Guardian, where she’ll write a weekly column “on media, politics, culture, and the urgent moral and political debates of the moment.” (She’s also currently teaching at Duke University.) ICYMI, I interviewed Sullivan last week to get her take on media coverage of the Biden-documents story.

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Mathew Ingram was CJR’s longtime chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.