The Great Indian Cover-Up Scandal
What is even more interesting to note is that this isn't just limited to Twitter, shortly after, there were Facebook posts by reverent public figures criticizing the mishandling of the situation and thereby popularizing the hashtag #ResignModi.
Chances are, you may have missed this trend simply because like the other anti-government posts, this too was short-lived and was removed from Facebook's trending page.
Facebook's reply to this stating that it was a mere ‘mistake’, further went on to prove the fact that how these social media giants are nothing but mere puppets in the hands of the ruling government.
The posts taken down by Facebook and Instagram aren't just limited to Anti- Government ones, they also include a huge number of posts asking for Hospital/Oxygen Cylinder leads, rising cases and deaths, shortage of medicines, patients struggling outside hospitals, and lastly how the BJP rallies remain unaffected by any of these grave realities.
Is the impact just limited to Social Media Spaces?
It is as if the trolls and the backlash these influencers and harbingers of truth faced wasn't bad enough, that the government now felt the need to suppress these posts and not let them see the light of the day and cancel them altogether.
Imagine having to face so much criticism and trolling for showing the truth the way it actually is and then waking up one day only to realize your one attempt at showing the world how bad the situation is, is taken down by the government.
What is worth noting is that all the people whose posts have been accused of ‘creating panic’ are those of Indian National Congress member Revanth Reddy, All India Trinamool Congress member Moloy Ghatak, and anti-Modi freelance journalist Pieter Friedrich, among others. Coincidence? We think not.
It is important to note here that the Cancel culture was not just limited to social spaces but had real-life consequences too. For example, in UP, people were sentenced to jail for posting against the government and reporting the out-of-hand situation.
What does one do when the Government simply turns a blind eye towards your needs? You ask for help from people online. This act can land you in Jail.
A man in UP tweeted asking for leads about oxygen cylinders for his 88-year-old relative and was charged under the Epidemic Act on grounds of his tweet creating fear and panic among the citizens.
This is just one of the many cases where innocent and helpless people are punished for freely practising their right to express themselves. CM Yogi Adityanath thinks it is okay to put people behind bars if they try to dissent against the ruling party.
It is not so much an alien concept that the Mainstream media is selective, in other words, a near puppet in the hands of the government.
Amidst all this, social media was one of the very few spaces left where people could freely criticize the government and portray the matters as they really are without any biases or fear. Is it fair to give up on that one free medium of expression given that the country is a 'democratic' one?
“All Good under the Hood”- Indian Government
It is one thing for the government to deny all these tweets and call it another left-wing propaganda, but not letting any and every tweet that gives us a true picture of how things truly are allowing to the mismanagement and the irresponsible behavior of the government, is definitely something that shakes our faith in this system of democracy.
When the government of the country takes a step like that, we at least expect there to be some sort of logic or a plausible explanation for the removal of such posts.
Well, the government sure gave one for the sake of it. However, the validity and the relevance of those reasons surely aren't enough to convince rational human beings.
One ground on which posts were removed is the fact that these posts created panic among the citizens, but hey wasn't the situation already at a stage where we should be panicking because it after all is a pandemic that is affecting lakhs of people every day, knowing that this virus is taking such a dangerous turn and we don't have sufficient healthcare infrastructure and facilities to curb this, is indeed a situation worth panicking.
We sure the government doesn't want us to think that it's all fine and under control when in reality it isn't or does it?
Seems like it, when they have shown their objection over graphics which included corpses of people dying because of the inadequate treatment and labeled them as incendiary inflammable messages that could incite the public and lead to assaults of healthcare personnel.
Even if we are to agree with the fact that this might be a real possibility considering how half knowledge is a dangerous thing and people in India have had a reputation of being triggered and incited very quickly, we still don't see it as a reason good enough for banning such posts altogether especially when we know sooner or later the banning of such posts will only lead to the pro-government posts to exist in social media spaces.
The need for a counter-narrative that shows the dire reality in which we find ourselves today is extremely important.
If it's By-Law, does it make everything justifiable?
While the government may have claimed the power to do so legally via section 69(A) Of India's information technology act allows the government to block public access to information available online, is it right for the government to do so morally?
One very possible drawback of the right to freely express and spread information is of course false information, which possibly is the only metric on which this decision would have made any sense, how do the authorities get to decide which information is fake and which isn't.
There is no denying the fact that there will always exist one fake news between five genuine ones, but nowhere is it justified to snatch away the right of those five genuine articles to exist in a space which we so freely proclaim as social media.
Since the youth of today spends far more time on the social media apps as compared to listening to real news, this medium thus being the most popular news source for Millennials, it becomes extremely important for there to exist news that isn't bigoted and shortsighted and biased, but rather opinions that are uninfluenced by those in power.
The power dynamics in our country have pervaded almost every aspect of our life and we simply cannot let it dominate a free space such as social media.
Written by - Jaisha Grover
Edited by - Akanksha Sharma
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