Social Media Curation Does Not Mean Arbitrary Shutting Down Of Accounts : Sanjay Hegde https://www.livelaw.in/interviews/social-media-curation-does-not-mean-arbitrary-shutting-down-of-accounts-sanjay-hegde-full-text-of-interview-203365 LIVELAW NEWS NETWORK 9 July 2022
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G0tqvjOu1Y&t=688s
Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde discusses in this interview with Manu Sebastian, Managing Editor of LiveLaw, issues relating to social media regulation..
if you lock out somebody from Google, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, then a person's access to the public square is denied.
As the public square and the digital public square belong to all users, under the garb of curating, you cannot arbitrarily shut down people. This was the rough outline of what we presented to the Delhi High Court. Curiously, the Government of India came around and said, "no no no we are not necessary parties here, we have nothing to do with this suspension, this is between Mr. Hegde and Twitter and we have nothing to say"....Now substantial hearings have begun and the Government of India took a u-turn around and said no no no twitter can't behave like this. Because, in the meanwhile, quite apart from me, some other accounts also got de-platformed and the Government obviously has had a rethink. .. do think that twitter needs to take a re-look as to which accounts it bans and for that, it should have a logical reason of imminent threat to not only public order but of inducing violence.
.. It may very well also be that Twitter's own organisation back in the larger organisation in the US may have been asking the the local unit as to whether they had crawled when being merely asked to bend. These were Mr. LK Advani's words describing what the press in India did during the emergency...
Sebastian : So there should be a certain regulation of social media to prevent violence and also to prevent hate speech especially in a diverse society like India, but at the same time it has to be ensured that the enforcement does not go into the extent of suppressing dissent or enforcing some sort of social media censorship.
