The US immigration system is notoriously unresponsive and unaccountable - if your visa gets rejected that is it.
Now, to some extent that is understandable - you are on foreign soil.
Facebook, Twitter and Google have created a system IN INDIA, that is equally or worse unaccountable and unresponsive. And our courts have gone along with them - let us see how.
There are four problems that immediately you can notice with them:
1. They do not allow collective appeals - you cannot band together as an affected party and report anything to them. You cannot identify patterns of usage or anything. You can report individual instances of violation that will NEVER be considered together.
2. Their content guidelines are decided by a group on top (because they are a private company) - they appear answerable to none. But they regularly show up in congressional hearings in the US and their guidelines are suited to western concerns.
When discussing hate speech, Facebook cites very specific items you cannot write - about Jews, Muslims and African Americans. These are concerns of the West; and people in far-flung places are supposed to guess at a level of abstract thinking about what will qualify as hate speech in their regions.
3. Their decisions on abusive speech are unappealable - and offer no explanation of why they decided something is not abusive speech.
As an example, the word பார்ப்பான் for Brahmins is derogatory - but repeated appeals to Facebook to ban such instances, under their OWN content guidelines are useless and there are no explanations.
4. Facebook does not have a solution to a situation like Tamilnadu - where the broader population is itself inured hate speech. This means content moderators who are selected to make decisions are also often from the same society, making decisions that cannot really be unbiased. It is like asking Nazi Germans to moderate hate speech themselves in 1938.
To solve these kind of problems, in 2011, the Government of India tried to bring in a system which required grievance officers and multi-level appealing process from IT intermediaries.
However, in 2015, the SC of India struck it down - in the judgement in Shreya Singhal vs Union of India, in case there is hate speech in social media you need to go to court; fight to have it classified as hate speech; and THEN go to the social media company to remove that instance, in case a decision is favorable to you!
That is, for each instance of hate speech you need to file a writ petition, folks!
Our own courts thus abandoned us to hate speech.
The current IT intermediary rules are going to suffer the same fate - because the courts do not understand that hate speech in high volume is different from writing about someone in a newspaper.
Meanwhile, we should note that the Western media has been running interference against our government's efforts to protect us, by calling the government itself as fascist and restricting free speech. At the same time, these people are cheering on their OWN government's efforts to regulate social media.
Someone has to fix this. We cannot allow these companies to poison the internet for us.
