UP digital media policy is anti-democratic
The Yogi Adityanath government’s new digital media policy for Uttar Pradesh is not public policy in any good sense but has most elements of a political policy that harms public interest and violates the best democratic norms and practices. The purported aim of the policy is to promote the government’s welfare schemes through social media but it actually curbs and penalises free speech and expression and allows public funds to be paid as remuneration to the government’s supporters. It proposes to take legal action against social media operators, influencers or agencies for uploading “objectionable content” which includes “indecent, obscene and anti-national” material. The policy is an attempt by the government to seek greater support from the social media with a threat of punishment or offer of rewards at a time when the BJP may have conceivably lost its dominant position on social media.
By offering incentives and hefty monetary rewards to social media influencers, the policy erases the line between propaganda and objective comment. The propagandists will be paid handsomely every month for promoting and praising the government and its schemes. That would amount to misuse of public funds and can be called bribes in a recognised form, and its legality can be questioned. A section of the social media may thus be turned into an extension of the Press Information Bureau (PIB) and Doordarshan. The social media influencers who work for the government would lose their credibility, as well, and would be considered as propagandists and advertisers, not trustworthy commentators. They will have to make the disclosure that they are in the pay of the government. What value would their opinions carry then? Issues related to conflict of interest and public trust would certainly arise for many, and for most of them, it will be a Faustian deal. Public comment on government schemes and projects should ideally make valid criticism of their concept, design and implementation to improve them. The government should actually be rewarding those who help it ‘debug’ its programmes and schemes by offering objective criticism.
The policy prescribes draconian punishment, including life imprisonment, for those who produce and post “obscene, objectionable or anti-national” content. This poses a serious threat to freedom of speech. None of the words used to describe offences under the policy is clearly defined, and so any criticism can be construed as a criminal or anti-national act. A social media post critical of the government can land a person in jail. That will have a chilling effect on the democratic rights of dissent and debate. The policy shows that Yogi Adityanath neither understands constitutional and democratic norms and niceties nor has learnt any lessons for the beating the BJP took, especially in UP, in the Lok Sabha election.