Will Facebook protect the human rights of WhatsApp users in India

A lawsuit filed this week by Facebook’s WhatsApp, asking the high court in Delhi to declare India’s new social media rules unconstitutional, raises the question: What will it do if it loses the case?

Under the guidelines, which went into effect this week, social media companies are required to help the government or courts identify “the first originator of the information" posted on their platforms.

Such restrictions are vague, overbroad and have the effect of curbing otherwise legal information which must be available to the public, Apar Gupta of the Internet Freedom Foundation said this week on the business news channel CNBC. The foundation is a New Delhi-based non-profit group whose goal is to defend online freedom, privacy and innovation in India.

In a generic blog post discussion of the impact of traceability, WhatsApp notes that “Reasonable and proportionate regulations for an increasingly digital world are important, but eroding privacy for everyone, violating human rights, and putting innocent people at risk is not the solution.”   

If WhatsApp wins the case, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government could immediately move to pass similar new rules. Even before the current social media guidelines were introduced in February this year, global human rights groups were pointing to the continued erosion of civil liberties in India.  

“Internet freedom in India declined dramatically for a third straight year,” Freedom House, for instance, noted in its Freedom of the Net 2020 Report. “International platforms were increasingly pressured to remove content critical of the government’s Hindu nationalist agenda.”

There were “internet shutdowns in at least nine states, including Delhi, (to suppress protests) as well as arrests for online speech and police violence against online journalists,” the report continued. Spyware campaigns targeted journalists, activists, lawyers, and other “human rights defenders, adding to an already restrictive environment for privacy.”

The “COVID-19 pandemic led to an information environment plagued by disinformation, often pushed by political leaders themselves…Government officials attempted to control the online narrative about the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing restrictions on reporting, arresting and detaining numerous people for their online speech.”

This week police went to Twitter’s Delhi office to serve a notice about its investigation into why a tweet, by an official of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was labelled as “manipulated media.” Under Twitter rules, the tag "manipulated media" is applied to posts which includes "media (videos, audio, and images) that have been deceptively altered or fabricated." The BJP runs the Indian government with Modi as Prime Minister.

"We, alongside many in civil society in India and around the world, have concerns with regards to the use of intimidation tactics by the police in response to enforcement of our global Terms of Service," Twitter said in a statement.

In April, Twitter, Facebook and its Instagram platform reportedly complied with a government order to remove posts critical of its handling of the virus. Media reports say the blocked posts included those from an opposition leader holding Prime Minister Modi directly responsible for COVID-19 deaths.

Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter are blocked from operating in China. So, the American social media companies are aggressively pursuing growth in India, which they view as their largest potential market.

WhatsApp’s has 400 million subscribers in India, its largest market in terms of reach. In April 2020, its parent Facebook invested $5.7 billion for a minority stake in Jio Platforms. Jio, which has more than 406 million cellphone subscribers, is part of Reliance Industries, India’s leading business group controlled by Mukesh Ambani. 

In June last year, Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter got a boost after TikTok and other Chinese social media apps were banned from India, following border clashes between Indian and Chinese troops. At that time, TikTok had more than 200 million users in India and was the most downloaded app in the country.  

Another winner is ShareChat, an Indian social media platform in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, and ten other major Indian languages. It has more than 160 million users, including for its Moj platform, which is similar to TikTok. Sharechat, which has Twitter as an investor, is a donor to the Internet Freedom Foundation.

If Facebook and Twitter are seen as ignoring the violation of human rights in India and other countries, they risk facing boycott campaigns in the U.S. and Western Europe. Boycotts could result in a loss of subscribers in these affluent markets, leading to a drop in advertising revenues as well as the stock market valuations of the two social media companies.  

Human rights groups in the West are already campaigning for social media companies to protect civil liberties in all the countries where they operate, not just in Western countries. Also, newer American social media rivals like Snapchat are offering stronger privacy protection as a way to attract more users.

WhatsApp states in a blog, that it “is committed to doing all we can to protect the privacy of people’s personal messages.“ If it loses the lawsuit against the Indian government, will it take the position that it’s court case is evidence that it did the best that it could?

In a statement released this week WhatsApp says that simultaneous with the lawsuit, “we will also continue to engage with the government of India on practical solutions aimed at keeping people safe, including responding to valid legal requests for the information available to us." Will this dialog result in the protection of the human rights of its users in India?

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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