Social media giants had to contend with the Great Firewall of China. Dealing with the world’s largest democracy was supposed to be easier. Yet messaging platform giant WhatsApp has gone for the jugular and is now suing India.
It wasn’t supposed to be like that.
The upset happened when the Modi government introduced new laws back in February aimed at curbing fake news and revenge porn among other issues. So far, so good. Except that New Delhi had requested traceability in terms of originator messages. WhatsApp contends that a single message can’t be traced — rather it has to be the whole chain or nothing. And if the latter, it would mean breaking the company’s prized end-to-end encryption. Civil society activists fear this would give way to a mass surveillance campaign by the Indian government.
This is not inconceivable. After all, the US got there first with the Patriot Act that saw an untold number of US and non-US citizens wiretapped in the name of national security. Elsewhere, back in 2015, then British prime minister,David Cameron, proposed banning all online messaging applications that offered end-to-end encryptions so that he could effectively listen in to terrorists. This resulted in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, nicknamed the snooopers’ charter. As recently as last month, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against the decade-long surveillance regime of Britain’s GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) along with MI5 and other state agents. Thus, the proven track records of both the US and UK will not work in Modi’s favour.
Social media platforms such as WhatsApp play an important political role, especially in those countries where the state has suffocated or blacklisted independent media. They also represent a vehicle for people-power mobilisation, as witnessed during the England riots of 2011 and the Arab Spring. Then, of course, there were reports of how the US trained Iranian youth to use social media as a weapon against Tehran following the 2009 disputed presidential elections.
Pakistan will be following the India case intently. Particularly in light of its own Removal and Blocking of Unlawful Online Content (Procedure, Oversight and Safeguards), Rules 2020. Though the Federal Minister for Information told BBC HARDTalk recently that these new provisions had not been promulgated while inviting tech giants to set up shop here or least discuss the prospect. But for India, the outcome of the Delhi High Court case will be a moment of truth, or dare. For it remains to be seen the extent to which WhatsApp will be ready to sacrifice the country’s 400 million-user market. *