In February 2021, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology announced new guidelines for social media companies, which required, among other things, the appointment of a chief compliance officer and the removal of content within 36 hours when requested by authorities, to take effect in May. [1]
Several companies, such as Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp, failed to confirm that they would comply and requested a 6-month delay to the enforcement of the law. [2] Koo, an India-based alternative to Twitter, announced it had complied with the law, [3] while Facebook announced its intent to comply. [4] On May 26, WhatsApp took the Indian government to court, stating that they believed the new laws were "unconstitutuional". [5]
Internet censorship in India is done by both central and state governments. DNS filtering and educating service users in suggested usages is an active strategy and government policy to regulate and block access to Internet content on a large scale. Also measures for removing content at the request of content creators through court orders have become more common in recent years. Initiating a mass surveillance government project like Golden Shield Project is also an alternative discussed over the years by government bodies.
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities and, since 2006, anyone over 13 years old. As of 2020, Facebook claimed 2.8 billion monthly active users, and ranked fourth in global internet usage. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
The Information Technology Act, 2000 is an Act of the Indian Parliament notified on 17 October 2000. It is the primary law in India dealing with cybercrime and electronic commerce.
Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets", owned by American company Twitter, Inc. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, however, unregistered users have the ability to only read tweets that are publicly available. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs. Prior to April 2020, services were accessible via SMS. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but the limit was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages in November 2017. Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.
Ravi Shankar Prasad is an Indian politician and lawyer, from the Bharatiya Janata Party. A Member of Parliament since 2000, first in the Rajya Sabha (2000-2019) and then in the Lok Sabha, Prasad has served as Union Minister multiple times: As Minister of State, he served in the ministries of Coal (2001-2003), Law and Justice (2002-2003), and Information and Broadcasting (2003-2004) under Atal Bihari Vajpayee's premiership; as Cabinet Minister, he held the Law and Justice, Communications, and Electronics and Information Technology (2014-2021) portfolios under Narendra Modi's premiership.
Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service associated with Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and far-right extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Journalists have described Parler as an alt-tech alternative to Twitter, and users include those banned from mainstream social networks or who oppose their moderation policies.
Censorship in Kashmir involves the censorship of both news media and social media as part of the Kashmir conflict.
Facebook is a social networking service that has been gradually replacing traditional media channels since 2010. Facebook has limited moderation of the content posted to its site. Because the site indiscriminately displays material publicly posted by users, Facebook can, in effect, threaten oppressive governments. Facebook can simultaneously propagate fake news, hate speech, and misinformation, thereby undermining the credibility of online platforms and social media.
Censorship of Twitter refers to Internet censorship by governments that block access to Twitter. Twitter censorship also includes governmental notice and take down requests to Twitter, which Twitter enforces in accordance with its Terms of Service when a government or authority submits a valid removal request to Twitter indicating that specific content is illegal in their jurisdiction.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and later acquired by American company Facebook Inc., now known as Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with preapproved followers. Users can browse other users' content by tag and location, view trending content, like photos, and follow other users to add their content to a personal feed.
WhatsApp Messenger, or simply WhatsApp, is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. WhatsApp's client application runs on mobile devices but is also accessible from desktop computers. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to sign up. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app targeted at small business owners, called WhatsApp Business, to allow companies to communicate with customers who use the standard WhatsApp client.
ShareChat is an Indian social media and social networking service, developed by Bangalore based Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd. It was founded by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan, and incorporated on 8 January 2015. ShareChat has over 250 million monthly active users across 15 Indian languages. The company's application offers features that include private messaging, tagging and a personal messaging feature, enabling users to share videos, jokes, songs and other language based social content with other unknown users.
Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta and formerly known as Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among other products and services.
The Information Technology Rules, 2021 is secondary or subordinate legislation that suppresses India's Intermediary Guidelines Rules 2011. The 2021 rules have stemmed from section 87 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and are a combination of the draft Intermediaries Rules, 2018 and the OTT Regulation and Code of Ethics for Digital Media.
Multiple governmental agencies and private business have imposed or attempted impose bans on the social media service TikTok. Countries like India and the United States have expressed concerns about the app’s ownership by the Chinese company, ByteDance, attempting to ban it from app stores. Countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh have banned it on the basis of pornography-related concerns, while others like Armenia and Azerbaijan have implemented restrictions to mitigate the spread of information which could lead to conflict.
Clubhouse is a social audio app for iOS and Android where users can communicate in audio chat rooms that accommodate groups of thousands of people. Other social audio apps like Discord Stage Channels, Facebook Live Audio Rooms, Reddit Talk, Slack Huddles, Spotify Greenroom, Telegram Voice Chats, and Twitter Spaces all directly compete with Clubhouse.
Koo is an Indian microblogging and social networking service, based in Bengaluru, India. As of May 2021, it is valued at over $100 million dollars. The microblogging site was co-founded by entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. Radhakrishna had founded online cab booking service TaxiForSure, which was subsequently sold to Ola Cabs. While the app was launched in early 2020, its participation and the subsequent winning of the government's Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge.
Josh is a video-sharing social networking service, owned by VerSe Innovation - an Indian technology company based in Bangalore, India. Josh is an Indian short video app that was launched in immediately after the Indian Government banned TikTok and other Chinese apps in June 2020. The founders of the platform have promoted the app as the “Instagram for Bharat” referring to their focus on the Indian audience that speaks its own regional and state languages. Josh was among the top 10 most downloaded apps social and entertainment apps in India of 2021 and had 150 million monthly active users as per April 2022.
Social audio is a subclass of social media that designates social media platforms that use audio as their primary channel of communication. This can include text messages, podcasts, tools for recording and editing audio in addition to virtual audio rooms. Still in an evolutionary state, different companies that develop social audio products are still trying to figure out what works for their users, and what doesn't.
Truth Social is a social media platform created by Trump Media & Technology Group, an American media and technology company founded in October 2021 by former U.S. president Donald Trump. The platform has been described as a competitor in the alt-tech field that includes Parler and Gab.