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Comment by vowelless | Hacker News Reader

The benefit is complying with local laws. Not all countries have “first amendment style free speech”. Note the speech restrictions in the Indian constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_expression_in_India

The farmers protests were allegedly detrimental to the sovereignty and security of India and so it makes sense to ban those kinds of hastags.

FWIW, the American government also requests removals from social media sites.

Edit: perhaps this comment is unnecessarily controversial / inflammatory. I just wanted to suggest that there are other interpretations of free speech law and that it makes sense for a corporation to comply with those laws if they want to operate in those countries. I personally dont agree with those laws, which is why I fortunately moved to the US.

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> The farmers protests were allegedly detrimental to the sovereignty and security of India and so it makes sense to ban those kinds of hastags.

Thats a fairly nonsensical claim. Are you planning back it up with more details/sources?

Because if we are just making sentences on the fly, IMO, this BJP regime has been allegedly detrimental to the sovereignty and security of India.

The hashtags insinuated the government was planning a farmer genocide.

Source: https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/govt-se...

How is that a threat to India's sovereignty or security? Modi is infamous for having caused, by his actions or inactions, the Gujarat riots that killed 2000+ people. Hell, he was even banned from entering the US, till he became the Indian PM. There is blood on his hands and lots of it.

And to give some context on this hash tag, I believe it came after the gov't put across barricades and barbed wires to caroll the protesters leading many to believe that the regime was planning a major crackdown. The situation in the first week of Feb was very tense.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/others/iron-spikes-bar...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-55899754

because now it will be harder to do the actual genocide without someone saying "hey, see! I told you so..."

> The situation in the first week of Feb was very tense.

Wasn't it partly due to the genocide misinformation? One protestor died in a tractor accident and Twitter did little to curb the misinformation that he was shot by police.

God help us if WhatsApp ever decides to curb BJP misinformation. Are the cops in UP going to make BJP WA group admins register like in Kashmir?

Claiming that the Prime minster is genociding farmers in a country of more than 100 million farmers certainly sounds worrisome. India's sovereignty is in good hands so I am not worried about that. But the same cannot be said for internal security. Government treating the protestors unfairly is no justification for spreading news that is clearly fake. To add more context, fake news has led to riots, murders and even incidents of mob lynching in the country.

Be careful what you say or Modi will demand that Hacker News hire a local Indian censor.

>I believe it came after the gov't put across barricades and barbed wires to caroll the protesters leading many to believe that the regime was planning a major crackdown.

Didn't the US also place barricades for Biden's inauguration?

I'm noticing a pattern here:

People, who deem it "good" that the US places barricades to corral protesters of the biden inauguration, are the same people inclined to deem it "bad" that India places barricades to corral protesters of the farm bills.

Similarly, people who deem it "good" that Twitter deplatforms #StopTheSteal are inclined to deem it "bad" that Twitter deplatforms #ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide

> Modi is infamous for having caused, by his actions or inactions, the Gujarat riots that killed 2000+ people.

An accusation for which he was acquitted by the Supreme Court of India.

And Modi's actions/inactions pale in comparison to those of the Congress Party, who actually committed genocide against the Sikhs in 1984, which resulted in up to 17,000 Sikhs getting murdered by Congress goons, for which noone has been held accountable.

> The farmers protests were allegedly detrimental to the sovereignty and security of India and so it makes sense to ban those kinds of hastags.

Why? How does a hashtag impact a country's sovereignty or security?

Edit: am I missing /s here?

The reasoning is that organizing for stuff like the farmers' strike or generally opposing Modi's politics threatens the security of India by... well, being critical of the government's actions.

It shows our Dear Leader in poor light and is thus something only anti nationals would do. Dissent is the biggest threat to India's sovereignty and free thought to its security.

> FWIW, the American government also requests removals from social media sites.

No, they don't. Any American Government official requesting a removal of anything from social media sites would probably lose their job. That's saying a lot because American Government officials rarely ever lose their jobs.

Yes they do. Not personally, but they do. The amount of child exploitation that falls through the filters is not zero, and sometimes the government of the US intervenes and asks for the content to be removed.

Removing that kind of illegal content by the police is 100% different from political officials asking to have content critical of the gov't removed.

The point is that India is a sovereign republic and has its own laws about what is illegal and is not. According to India's laws, spreading false rumours about the police shooting a farmer when there is clear evidence that the person actually died by running his tractor into a barricade is illegal. And when Twitter failed to comply with government's orders to remove these tweets, they didn't have any point of contact from the company they could turn to for accountability. That's why the need for the compliance officer.

Also, criticizing the government is not illegal according to Indian laws.

Who determines that their is "clear evidence". Shouldn't a judge be involved?

>Who determines that their is "clear evidence".

In this case, anyone with an eye.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgSLaOMEzHY

That video is of such poor quality that it's hard to determine anything from it. Yes, a tractor hit a barrier, flipped, and caught fire. Unclear why it hit the barrier. Did the driver intentionally run it into the barrier? Did the police shoot him and then the tractor continued on into the barrier?

Not saying it wasn't the simple explanation, but that video is not really evidence of anything either way.

Erm, you are requiring the kind of rigor that is needed to establish someone's guilt for establishing someone's innocence. Innocence is the null hypothesis.

The quality of evidence supporting the rumor that the person had been shot by the police was extremely sketchy and the evidence that is available points to the incident being an accident.

Illegal is just whatever the law says is illegal. If you make a law making dissent illegal, then that content is illegal. So now you have to define 'real'-illegal and 'I do not like your opinion'-illegal in the law of some other country.

ok, so removal of obvious illegal content like child exploitation is not equivilent to removal of content like "I don't agree with your political view" -- which is basically IMHO what this hashtag thing in india amounts to...?

> "I don't agree with your political view" > which is basically IMHO what this hashtag thing in india amounts to...?

No, it doesn't. The tweets under that hashtag were spreading a false rumour that the police had shot at a farmer when there was a CCTV footage showing clearly that the said person had died in an accident caused by him running his tractor into a barricade.

I don't quite understand this need to quickly pass judgements on complex politics of a different country, without spending the minimum required time and effort to familiarize yourself with the topic.

You don’t think the US can have things removed from social networks for “national security” reasons?

Probably not. First Amendment and Streisand Effect.

> Any American Government official requesting a removal of anything from social media sites would probably lose their job

You missed FOSTA/SESTA then? That forced the removal of anything that even looks vaguely like sex work from social media.

Crickets... no answer.

Then why is Pelosi still employed? https://sputniknews.com/world/202002081078259986-facebook-tw...

Twitter declined this time, but I have a hard time believing the Democrats had no hand in twitter blocking the Biden laptop story or removing Trump from the platform

You mean like when AOC asked Google and Apple to ban Parler and they complied?

I'm sure AOC's demand was critical in their decision to ban such a vibrant, positive application.

Ignoratio Elenchi: refuting an opponent while actually disproving something not asserted.

Your opponent was elaborating on the original claim that "If any American Government official requesting a removal of anything from social media sites would probably lose their job", then "AOC should also lose her job when she requested removal of Parler"

Your counter argument, "I'm sure AOC's demand was critical in their decision to ban such a vibrant, positive application" is an unfair redirection of what your opponent was asserting.

AOC doesn't have a job to be fired from, she has a position that she was elected to.

And a public plea for a company to take a certain course of action is different than a direct request. The latter carries much more "or else" subtext. An upset Congressperson doesn't carry the same potential for immediate disaster as having the DOJ on your back.

I thought that there was American government pressure to remove Al Qaeda/ISIS propaganda from social media sites. If not, then I hope the american gov takes a stronger stance against terrorism.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-webs...

Amazon was pressured to stop hosting Wikileaks.

Everybody answering this with examples of Congresspeople is clearly missing that elected officials can't lose their jobs. You have to vote them out of office. It's why politicians can get away with saying and doing way more outrageous things than any ordinary employee, and arguably can just flat-out break the law in many cases if the rest of the government refuses to enforce laws against their own party members, claiming all attempts at enforcement action to be politically motivated from the other side.

An actual civil servant enjoys no such impunity from normal rules of conduct.

Super interesting Wikipedia article, thanks for the link! Some of the restrictions on free speech make me instinctually uncomfortable (i.e. restrictions for the sake of "decency and morality"), but I recognize these are hardly unique to India and countries such as the U.S. have censored plenty of books, etc. in the past.

I'm not sure that I personally am in favor. However, you're clearly right in that it's hardly unprecedented or unique.

>countries such as the U.S. have censored plenty of books, etc. in the past.

The modern interpretation of the 1st amendment as being fairly absolute is only 50-100 years old. Don't forget the federal government had political prisoners for protesting against the US getting involved in WW 1, and the HUAC and McCarthy hearings were blatantly unconstitutional under modern jurisprudence.

We don't even need to talk about the Alien and Sedition acts, passed right after the 1st amendment was ratified!

Or the Comstock acts. At one point it was illegal to distribute information on contraception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws#State_laws_on_bi....

That's true. It did take the US 200 years to come to the correct interpretation of First Amendment being damn near absolute. Shameful as that delay was, we progressed in the right direction.

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