TMC's Saket Gokhale
Credit: PTI Photo
TMC Rajya Sabha MP Saket Gokhale on Friday issued an advisory for individual content creators on X.
"This is very important for almost ALL of you," he began, before explaining that posts on politics and current affairs, videos on the government or politics will come under the ambit of the Modi government's Broadcasting Services Bill.
He went on to explain that this means such individuals would need to be registered with the government.
Further, they would be subject to the same rules as media outlets.
Gokhale also said "you'll have to abide by the Modi Govt's rules & diktats on censorship & delete tweets whenever you're ordered to," warning that otherwise one might have to go to jail.
The TMC leader said this comes after "BJP's humiliating results in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections" and said that Modi is now "rattled & paranoid" before accusing him of "coming after ordinary citizens who have succesfully fought BJP's lies & propaganda on social media."
Gokhale concluded that this Bill would 'destroy and uproot whatever little is left' the freedom of expression in India for citizens.
Clause 20 of the Bill says “any person who broadcasts news and current affairs programs through an online paper, news portal, website, social media intermediary, or other similar medium but excluding publishers of newspapers and replica e-papers of such newspapers, as part of a systematic business, professional, or commercial activity shall adhere to the Programme Code and Advertisement code referred to in Section 19”.
Gokhale had spoken on this earlier as well, saying "They ultimately want to control the virality of content. If there is a random individual posting things and earning money through it but has very few followers, the government may not want to go after such de minimus activity."
However, at that time, he had opined that the common person was unlikely to be impacted by this.