India is rapidly digitising. There are good things and bad, speed-bumps on the way and caveats to be mindful of. The weekly column Terminal focuses on all that is connected and is not – on digital issues, policy, ideas and themes dominating the conversation in India and the world.If one looks into the development of all digital infrastructures that were built in India over the past decade, each of them have been built with “single source of truth” as the information model. Every bureaucrat who was involved in digitisation of land records, identity databases and digital welfare systems was claiming to be building a single source of truth of our personal records that can be used in governance. With the new amendments to The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, the government has extended this model to social media, where it intends to verify every statement being made as true or not. The efforts by the Ministry of Information Technology and Electronics on setting up a ‘fact checking unit’ to fact check social media platforms is clearly a censorship drive. The fact checking unit being set up to verify content on social media has one big problem though, they need to know all the facts before they censor the fake news. Even if the fact checking unit does a great job of being impartial towards fake news, the very act of setting up this unit shows the government is monitoring these platforms and its users leading towards censorship. The Minister of State for Information Technology and Electronics has made it clear, the government is the only body with access to factual data to certify any online speech as fake or otherwise. This idea of certifying truth with the state becoming the only source of truth is dangerous for any free society. It is also unfortunate the state won’t tell us what these truths are and will only censor our speech instead of educating us with facts. Single source of truth is an informational model which ensures data from multiple databases/departments is inter-linked to create a reference database – ‘a master database’ – which is the only accepted true data in the entire organisation. To illustrate – if your land passbook says you have 10 acres of land, but the revenue database says you only have eight acres of land, another government database for welfare says you have 12 acres of land, then eight acres is considered truth no matter the actual on the ground land possession. Here, the perceived truth by the government is not a fact measurable and quantifiable on the ground.Disputes like this exist across all government records, which by all means are considered truth and absolute truth by the entire bureaucracy. If you are not part of these single sources of truths, you simply do not exist and your claims are wrong. Just like how you wont be a citizen without a verified certificate and you are not a voter unless you link your Aadhaar to your voter ID. Unless otherwise certified through the new digital mechanisms in India, you are either dead, duplicate or just a fraud and now so is our speech.In any democracy, there can be multiple truths – beliefs that are often promoted through various politics. One can have multiple beliefs of why the government ordered demonetisation or read down Article 370. The government’s version of truths are not often facts and one cannot be forced to accept them as the only truth. The IT Rules have no provision to appeal government claims or their perceived truth resulting in executive overreach. The rules themselves have been issued under provisions of Section 79 of IT Act, which itself is being contested as ultra vires by Kunal Kamra in Bombay high court. These rules are going to further push information asymmetry between the state and the citizenry, with access to information being curtailed through censorship. It is not just freedom of speech but also our right to information that gets hampered when news reports about the government are censored. Fake news is a problem in our post-truth world and addressing it requires education, training our population about the dangers through digital literacy. This is especially important with the rise of synthetic reality with artificial intelligence which are manufacturing content that has never happened and is not real. The social effects of recommendation algorithms and new hyper reality that has emerged through proliferation of social media is an issue that requires serious debate. Instead we are being offered a solution that undermines free speech and sets us back as a society. The existing censorship practices shows us the government has never explained to anyone why something needs to be censored or justified them in our courts. Takedowns and blocking of websites, bans of mobile applications have all been done through executive action with no oversight. With all the noble intentions of the government, this setup will be misused and weaponised with consequences that harm us as a free society.
