Understanding the New ‘Online Media Regulation’ Gazette Notification
The digital/online media regulation by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is a widely discussed issue. The Second Schedule of the Government of India (Allocation of Business) Rules was amended to include some new entries, including “films and audio-visual programmes”, “news” and “current affairs” content, all of which falls within the ambit of digital/online media.
There are several questions that one might ask about freedom of speech and expression or the ambiguity of the new gazette notification. So far we had statutory bodies to regulate the content of radio, print and electronic media, however there is so far no regulatory process to monitor content online. While there are guidelines relating cyber crimes under IT Act and different platforms have their own community guidelines, the government recently decided to act upon online regulation from online news portals to the OTT platforms. The plan of action for the same still remains undisclosed.
The government claims that this is to ensure prevention in the spread of undemocratic sentiments online, rising from misinformation, hate speech, etc. This does sound like a fair reason for joining the online regulation spree with countries like Australia, Singapore or China, but the question is can we regulate it?
The control over news media platforms or news of any kind is a real threat to democracy as it might direct a state towards an authoritarian regime. In the past too one has seen increasing monopoly due to regulation of what qualifies these said standards set by the government. Similarly for OTT films, this might hamper creativity because being critical of a system would be difficult.
The conservative forces in majority will also hold a say in this regulation as the popular platforms like Netflix, Prime Video, Zee5, etc were not regulated and thus were presenting content which offended their views. Now, just like the censorship for mainstream Hindi film industry by Central Board of Film Certification, the content on these portals could also be censored which eventually will hamper the progressive parallel cinema from reaching to the masses.
Sidharth Vardharajan, the founding editor of online news portal ‘The Wire’ too raised concerns about suppression of dissent due to such policies. In an interview to Al-Jazeera he said that he believes digital media regulates interself. He mentioned
“All the restrictions that exist on regular media such as the law of defamation or various other constraints, they all apply to digital media. In addition to that, digital media has the burden of compliance with the Information Technology Act which does not apply to newspapers and news channels.”
This is true because with options of reporting content on social media, the platforms take down content by themselves mostly. This extra layer of regulation will just stop free voice in the democatic country.
