Social Media Curation Does Not Mean Arbitrary Shutting Down Of Accounts : Sanjay Hegde | Full Text Of Interview

Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde discusses in this interview with Manu Sebastian, Managing Editor of LiveLaw, issues relating to social media regulation and concerns regarding censorship of free speech, in the backdrop of Twitter choosing to challenge some content blocking orders issued by the Government of India.The video of the interview can be watched here.The transcript of the interview is given below :Sebastian : A very interesting development has taken place this week. Social media platform Twitter has challenged some blocking orders issued by the Central Government before the Karnataka High Court. In their petition, Twitter has said that some of the orders issued by the Central Government are "arbitrary" "disproportionate" and "are not fulfilling the requirements of the Information Technology Act". More importantly, Twitter has also said that some orders were directed against political content. So this has given rise to a lot of debates regarding social media regulation and also the government agencies trying to control social media and exercising censorship. We have with us Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde to discuss various aspects regarding this development.Welcome sir. In 2019, Twitter had suspended your account and you were a very vocal critic of the government agencies. You had a prominent reach as well with over one lakh followers and you have filed a petition in the Delhi High Court challenging the action of Twitter. And now Twitter has questioned some of the actions of the Central Government. So how do you see this development?Hegde : Well this is ironical isn't it? At that particular point of time, my account had been brought down by what I believe was coordinated action on the part of certain IT cells who probably gamed Twitter's algorithm to ensure that my account got suspended temporarily then.When I appealed, the fight basically turned upon what is called my header photograph. The header photograph was a very famous photograph of everybody doing a Nazi Salute while one fellow stood with his arms across his chest. He was a person called August Landmesser and that's a separate story. That photograph is a photograph of defiance against Nazism and against collective group think. However Twitter's algorithms or Twitter's internal processes were told it was a pro- Nazi photograph and therefore the account should come down. I obviously thought that if an algorithm gets it wrong, that is why a human appeal is provided and a human appeal will get it right. But Twitter persisted and has shut down the account. That leads me to believe that it was not only gamed. Twitter operating in India had its own kind of little favors that it traded in with the Government of the day. Many people complained that their followers were cut down or were not verified or reach was restricted. You remember, even Rahul Gandhi complained that his Twitter account was being sort of shadow banned. So, well Twitter India in those days seemed to be playing in footsie with the Government, if i may use an Americanism, at that point of time. When I went to court, I raised a few fundamental questions, because I believe that these are questions which will affect the future of free speech at large - both in India and elsewhere. After all, when we exercise free speech on a platform and if the platform were to say, look I will suddenly shut you down because I don't like what you're speaking and I can do anything because I'm a private entity, is that right? If free speech, which is a public good, a public function, should it be held to the private wishes of private corporation? So 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". So, they actually tried to shut down the petition. But thankfully, the Delhi High Court continued with the petition, but it could not substantially be heard because of the intervening pandemic. 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. So it says now that significant social media intermediaries do perform a kind of public function and should be governed by the law of the land including the constitutional values of free speech as available to all citizens in the Indian constitution. Now Twitter, which ironically said that it was not really subject to the Delhi High Court's jurisdiction in my...

Social Media Curation Does Not Mean Arbitrary Shutting Down Of Accounts : Sanjay Hegde | Full Text Of Interview

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Social Media Curation Does Not Mean Arbitrary Shutting Down Of Accounts : Sanjay Hegde | Full Text Of Interview

Manu Sebastian

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