Free speech isn't absolute, but in attempting to clamp down on social media, the government is looking away from the real source of hate rhetoric, and looking to control the levers of an emerging information power.

The most striking thing about the government’s latest efforts to clamp down on social media platforms and block websites, ostensibly to spike rumour-mongering of the sorts we saw last week, is the extent to which it has the enthusiastic support of many in the mainstream media.

The government has thus far blocked 254 websites on the grounds that they bore inflammatory messages that contributed to the fear psychosis among people from the north-east and triggered their ‘exodus’ from some of India’s cities.

The government has additionally threatened to take legal action against Twitter, evidently because it has “refused to cooperate” in the crackdown on web sites with inflammatory messages. Facebook and YouTube are, on the other hand, cooperating with the government and, according to the Telecom Secretary, have validated the government’s claim that many of these inflammatory messages were uploaded from Pakistan.

There are, of course, no absolute freedoms, including freedom of speech – even in democratic societies. Landmark judgements in other geographies have upheld the government’s right to abridge free speech in certain contexts, particularly when a larger interest – that of protecting public safety – requires it.

The litmus test, as was applied in a US case, was whether a person had a right to the free-speech defence when he shouts “fire” in a crowded theatre, when in fact there was no fire – and thereby causes a stampede.

The judge observed: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic… The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger…”

Last week’s rumour-mongering, which warned of attacks on people hailing from the north-east, is the nearest that comes to that fire-in-a-theatre parallel.

To that extent, the government may be well within its moral and executive right to curtail free speech momentarily in extenuating circumstances in a larger cause – so long as the effort is directed at the correct sources of rumour-mongering and generation of hatred.

Yet, in attempting to clamp down on social media platforms like Twitter, the government may be resorting too readily to the censorship instinct, and worse channelling its energies in entirely the wrong direction. In this particular instance, it may be barking up the wrong tree.

If the government needed to look for more widely disseminated disinformation campaigns in volatile situations, which have a far greater potential to fan the flames of communal hatred, it doesn’t have to look beyond instances like the ones cited by CM Naim, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago.

On Outlook.com, Prof Naim points to and translates fraudulent reports and doctored images in the Urdu daily Sahafat, published in Delhi, that actively feed hatred against Buddhists (in the context of the alleged atrocities on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar), and feed the Muslim victimhood project. (You can read Prof Naim’s translation here.)

Asks Prof Naim: “Would the people at Sahafat acknowledge the fraud they perpetrated? Would they confess to their intentions? Would any of the so-called Muslim leaders in Delhi—the “Shahi” Imam, the Mushawarat savants, the Madani cousins—take notice of the matter, and demand criminal proceedings against the newspaper? Would (Press Council Chairman) Mr Markandey Katju take notice of it? I strongly doubt it. Why? Because this sort of thing has been going on in much of the Urdu press in Delhi and Hyderabad for a long time, and has always been ignored by the Anglophone media and its participants and patrons.”

On another such Urdu media platform, the Siasat Daily, an even more venomous discussion is going on, which qualifies in every way as hate-mongering on a scale that social media platforms like Twitter, with all their faults, cannot hope to match.

Yet, when there are glaring instances of hate-mongering afoot in the far-more-powerful communication channels that constitute the mainstream media, the government has returned instinctively to its earlier (aborted) effort to curtail the social media space. And in this endeavour, curiously, it has the enthusiastic backing of the mainstream media.

An editorial in the Indian Express, which was in an earlier time a tireless critic of any attempt to restrict freedoms, shakes the pom-poms vigorously in defence of curbs on online content and on the social media space today. “Digital communication, which used to be a space apart, the final frontier of free speech, is now mainstream. It should follow the norms of the offline world, which expects reasonable temporary restrictions on behaviour in difficult times,” the editorial notes.

Some of India’s leading television anchors too have gone on record as approving of curbs on anonymous Twitter users – on the grounds that they are the “most dangerous”. It is of course true that some of the abuse that these media celebrities get on Twitter is downright filthy – and indefensible. Yet, such a framing of the discourse appears to conflate personal abuse – to which celebrity media personalities were immune in an earlier bubble world of top-down broadcasting – with more widespread hate-mongering.

In fact, the underlying tension between mainstream media, which is increasingly being held up to scrutiny of its own failings, and the new-age social media, which has opened up a two-way discourse and turned everyone with a cellphone into a potential “citizen journalist”, may account for why media celebrities seem to favour curbs on social media, when – as has been pointed out – the more dangerous problem of hate-mongering lies elsewhere.

As Ravi Sundaram, a senior fell at the CSDS and the editor of the upcoming book No Limits: Media Studies from India, noted recently, the mobile phone in the hands of today's young “has effectively destabilised classic forms of informational power.” Older media like television remain powerful but increasingly fragile — “hence the nervous hysterics of television anchors.”

Faced with an “emerging, expressive media culture” that gives people “radical strengths of subverting power”, the government is clamping down, and mainstream media stars are cheering it on. But it is stupid, he adds, to shut down social media or mobile phone networks.

If anything, the government could have used those selfsame social media platforms and mobile phone networks to effectively counter the rumours and the hate-mongering. A failure to use the platforms imaginatively has given way to knee-jerk resort to censorship – of the wrong channels.

As Sundaram says, “If the government spent less time massaging the egos of large media networks, and came to grips with this changed world, we could see quicker interventions, and fewer panics than we have seen recently.”

What we are witnessing is an insidious attempt to control the levers of information power — and a failure on the part of both the authorities and the mainstream media — to acknowledge the momentous nature of the change in the discourse.