Social networking sites facebook, Twitter and youtube have again been blamed   creating chaos in India. Allegedly troubled over these sites being responsible for spreading rumour and panic among people of North-Eastern origin, the Congress has yet again started its favourite pastime – censorship of social media. Twitter handles, facebook pages and all allegedly inflammatory content are being blocked.

Here are two givens:

1) The fact that the Congress has traditionally considered censorship as the political equivalent of the elixir of life which can cure all democratic ills, and

2) The abysmally low credibility of the Congress-led UPA-II and the resulting desperation for distraction and preventing people from blaming them freely, the decision to “censor” is not surprising. Their ideological lords – the rulers of USA, their competitors/rivals in China, the power families of Middle East, the lords of Africa, all seem to be at war with social media. This list includes traditional corporate media and business corporations – example the open hostility which major news corporations have shown towards Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Time we enquire into the reasons why social media has become such a pain in the neck for the Establishment.

Systemically Unregulated 

The first problem for the Establishment is social media is social. Content on social media is generated by innumerable people, organisations and sources. There is no set agenda or editorial position to which the content has to conform. It demolishes the hierarchy of traditional media and demolishes the stage on which actors (political, business, films and all others) play out parts in front of an audience watching in awe. Stripping away auras and legends it reduces the biggest of leaders and celebrities to a source which can be questioned, countered and even ridiculed to any extent – and all this in 140 characters and a click. Unlike traditional regulated media it democratises discourse and empowers individuals like never before.

It isn’t rare to see superbly polished products of a super-expensive art house ending up defeated by no-cost homemade content. For example the interrogation scene of Joker by Batman from The Dark Knight, when seen on youtube, will show that the original scene made by the Gods of Hollywood spending god knows how many million dollars had (at the time this was written) a paltry 8,89,231 views while a (undeniably hilarious) home video spoof of it had a staggering 1,86,83,870 views.

Joker’s Interrogation

Joker Interrogation Spoof

This inherent anarchy makes regulation of content, ensuring content conforms to a desired end, or making content stay within a certain comfort zone very nearly impossible.

Limits of Censorship

Censorship too is far easier said than done.

The very first hurdle to censorship is the staggering volume of participants, both human and non-human, that we have. As of today, facebook has over 950 million and Twitter over 500 million active users worldwide. India ranks third in all countries (after US and Brazil) in the number of users contributed. These and other forms of social media, from blogging platforms like wordpress or video sites such as youtube or mapping programs which allow people to tag and mark themselves and places in it, have mega-sized contents, participants and a tangle of powerful algorithms which are deployed over gigantic server networks which crisscross the globe many times over.

So even attempting direct censorship of such sites (as was proposed by Kapil Sibal and is done with real life books and movies) is a statistical disaster and can blow up embarrassingly in the face of those who attempt it. (As had happened to Kapil Sibal when thousands of netizens began tweeting and posting “Sibal is an idiot”).

Is there no censorship at all of online content? There is. Almost all the companies which own these sites influence what sort of content is made available to users. Google and its infamous “search bubble” is an apt example of that. Or for that matter gmail, youtube and facebook where algorithms judge your preferences by crunching data collected about your browsing habits – and tailor content and advertisements accordingly.

Corporations like Google and Microsoft are known for being pliant to government agencies, both overt and covert, and turning in people or details about them. Some private companies track and limit their employees’ communications so as to limit the possibility of having their business interests harmed.

Though not a lesser evil, these are indirect forms of censorship. Very unlike the direct kind which is more up the street of the Congress party of Emergency fame, or its allies the Samajwadi Party, Trinamool etc.

Now even if the Establishment manages to work out a deal with the corporations to somehow censor social media and wins its war with hackers, we have at hand a far bigger problem that appears insurmountable. Regulating and censoring of social media takes away the very essence of it being social and turns it into traditional media. Or in other words, it kills social media and replaces it with broadcasting.

So the question for the censors is how to censor without killing it. Congress-style bans are most certainly not workable.

Social Media: A Package Deal 

Killing social media is quite out of the question since it really is a big deal – as in literally a deal which pays rich dividends.

Take the case of the Trinamool Congress bandwagon.

Mamata Banerjee’s typical overstatements about “shipiem” people leading slanderous campaigns against her and arresting people who post cartoons notwithstanding, she made her party take to facebook to campaign for her choice of presidential candidate. Her foremost English-speaking face Mr Derek O’Brien is a rather prolific tweeter tweeting to netizens in rapid-fire rounds every day. Clearly in trying to establish herself and her party as “modern”, she and her team are investing time (and obviously money) in being on facebook and on websites.

https://www.facebook.com/MamataBanerjeeOfficial

With news and messages and songs and pictures literally being delivered into the hands of the audience, the sheer outreach of this is unlike anything ever seen in the past. Not just high offices of the government like the PMO or political stars like MP Shashi Tharoor, Bollywood stars to telecom giants, everyone wants their share of the social media pie.

What troubles them is the anarchy of it all.

Things may turn suddenly uncomfortable for a person or group who/which had until then been basking in the warmth of friendly tweets and posts. An example of this is Reliance Entertainment and other private corporations who love it when videos (like Kolaveri Di) go viral but then choke up internet services and prevent people from sharing their movies. They want to use people and their natural tendency to “share” to sow the seeds of popularity, but when it comes to reaping the profits from that they go hammer and tongs after people who share.

Democratic by Birth

The reaction to new and social media has been hostile from many quarters. Some talk of it as a passing fad and nothing that matches the legendary rigour of old school journalism/entertainment. Others ridicule and scoff at its lack of wisdom. Some may even be offended by the impertinence of young fellows who think they can pull at every high wig.

While accepting that there is a lot to be offended by what is tweeted and posted every day, it must be said that the criticisms by the conservative are wrong.

It’s wrong to think that social media or internet democracy gives birth to hacker collectives like the Anonymous and Wikileaks or software initiatives like the ToR project or GPG encryption software or people like Julian Assange and Jacob Applebaum. It was the other way round wherein hundreds and thousands of nameless people like these gave birth to not only internet democracy but to the internet as we know it today. They took birth from ideas of freedom, democracy, justice and the like – ideas inalienable from humankind.

And the fight which we see between the young hackers and bloggers of India and the Congress party, the corporations, corporate media or any avatar of the Establishment, is not a fight of technology. It’s a war that has been waged since long – the one which pits freedom against un-freedom. And until the latter loses out completely, no change in technology or censorship is going to stop it.