This is silly and unnecessary sarcasm that doesn't take into account the reality of the world.

Different localities have different dominant networks. E.g. Instagram Stories and Viber in Europe, vs Snapchat and WhatsApp in the US, vs VKontakte in Russia. Clearly, banning a global dominant network will only spur the creation and migration to a more local, but likely still centralized, network. (It might still be equally, or differently but to the same degree, censorious.)

Suppression is not the only problem information endures. False information and overall narrative engineering is capable of doing equal, and probably more, harm than mere absence of information.

> With these platforms banned, it will be more easy for Indians to encounter information that challenges the dominant narrative of the elites.

You assume the "free range" information flowing around is free from the influence of 'the elites'. It might not be by the elites you particularly resent, but rest assured it is still going to be a strata of elites, who have the massive resources to organize, build, publish, market, brand, filter, "fact check" etc what information is allowed to flow around with what credibility.

Wouldn't banning a massive centralised network lead to more people talking over smaller networks?

One would hope. But that is not what is going to happen. People do not talk over small networks because they are inconvenient due to their small size. It is more convenient to talk over large networks because there are more people to talk to.

If you ban a massive centralized network, another one will take its place. It will certainly be smaller than Facebook, but no less centralized. And in this particular case, I would imagine that based on the Indian government's grievances with these American networks, information will almost certainly be less free on the replacement.

On the contrary, nearly all of the most impactful conversations you've ever had have have been in small groups or one on one.

GP isn't suggesting otherwise. They're saying that people trend towards larger networks, regardless of the quality of those networks or their impacts. Facebook and Co can be banned tomorrow, but the next phase will see a surge of small players getting bigger and bigger until one of them reaches a Facebook and Co. For India status, landing the people of India where they started. Except that the new incumbent will be more easily pressured or controlled by India's government.

But that doesn't prevent said conversations from happening on a large social network.

Email, Facebook, SMS, Twitter, and Discord are all massive networks that all can also facilitate small group conversations.

But maybe it will be run by Indian people, who will enforce Indian values, and who are accountable to their Indian families and Indian peers and Indian law.

In India Modi's government has a long history of subverting media and trying to use government powers to control narrative. I don't think totalitarianism (even though backed by the government) is a good option.

In India, this would mean enforcement of recently invented Indian values such as fascism, communalism, anti miscegenation laws, segregation laws, denaturalization, casteism, arrest and murder of journalists, and faking or withholding of numbers of national importance such as covid19 deaths, farmer suicide stats, gdp numbers and other economic indicators. These topics are not accountable to a certain minority of Indian families of privileged upbringing.

It will certainly be run by people who will accede to the Indian government's requests to remove anything the Indian government does not like. Ironically you started off upthread complaining about removal of 'true, important information about the pandemic'. You'll never guess what the subject of most of the Indian government's removal requests have been lately...

So the question is who decides. Do you let rich coastal Americans determine what you're allowed to talk about or do you let local powers make those decisions? Indians aren't very fond of foreign rule, and no control is more potent than control over information and ideas.

>Indians aren't very fond of foreign rule, and no control is more potent than control over information and ideas.

One of the elements missing in the intra-US debate is that a lot of the hostility that much of the country feels toward Silicon Valley is generated from a very similar feeling. To many, how culturally distant elites on the coasts are from those in "middle America" coupled with how much power the former has over the later ... it can, at times, make it feel like there's an element of foreign rule. Technology has made it a lot easier to project cultural power - once you have it. Once you lose it, it seems it's almost impossible to get it back.

No, the question is whether Indians are free to choose to read things which are inconvenient to the Indian government [but not at all irksome to rich coastal Americans], or whether the Indian government gets to determine which information and ideas are allowed to be disseminated online in India. Facebook and Twitter seek only to control their own, separate platforms.

(Plus of course what will actually happen is that Facebook and Twitter will comply, and Indian users of those platforms will be subject to both the whims of California-based moderators and the Indian government's current penchant for objecting to pictures of funerals and suggestions they might not be doing a wonderful job. The potency of control of information and ideas in action; nobody in the upper echelons of the Indian government cares about Zuckerberg's policy on the lab-leak theory...)

You're indulging in a huge fiction: that people freely choose what to read and what to believe. Your beliefs are a product of your environment, and your environment was traditionally mostly your family and broader community and country, but today your environment includes massive online oligopolies that have extreme power due to network effects.

If your country is consuming information through the filter of the American coastal elite, then they are likely to come to believe in the things that the American elite believes, to despise the things that the American elite despises. We can meaningfully speak of individuals having a choice to believe this or that, but as a society, that kind of domination of information will predictably drive people to believe what they are told to believe.

None of which changes the fact that what is actually happening is that the Indian government is the one seeking to dominate information to drive Indians to believe what they are told to believe.

It cares not in the slightest whether Indians get access to things Facebook cares to censor (which they can anyway, through the large majority of Indian media Facebook does not influence or seek to influence) but is determined to browbeat Facebook into removing evidence that the Indian government's handling of COVID might be suboptimal. This is the purpose of the policy. Reinstating posts on lab leak theories is not the purpose of the policy, and the American coastal elite (or Bangalore tech elite) will continue to censor stuff they want to on their platforms in addition to the more pervasive and more universal Indian-government censorship.

Takes a remarkable degree of dishonesty to make freedom of thought arguments in favour of the Indian government being able to prevent any material it does not agree with from reaching Indian eyeballs.

American big-tech deciding what's bad is much worse that than Indian government trying to dominate them. These companies are also not a single point of information for most of the people. Indians can still get government critical news from news sites.

Indians cannot get news critical of the government from companies within India. They have various tools and methods to harass Indian media into submission, that is simply not available against international media.

The reason for the ban is obvious. Twitter tagged propaganda by the government as fake news.

If it's a for-profit enterprise, it will be run by people whose primary loyalty is to shareholders and their own pocketbooks.

1. The number of people talking on small networks will probably go up.

2. The total number of people talking on all networks will probably go down.

The decrease in 2 is probably orders of magnitude larger than the increase in 1. I don't think that it's necessarily a positive change.

Why do you assume that it would be a good thing?

Bigger companies have much bigger kitty and clout and they can fight back when something unreasonable is being pushed down the throat.

Smaller companies will be completely at the mercy of the governments.

I am guessing that these companies are deliberately waiting for a court case.

Banning == censorship, are you sure you want that?

Not from India but personally I'd much rather my government not set such precedents and not have such power to block websites. Next thing you know they'll be blocking credible sites to spread their own misinformation agenda.

A lot of the privileged Indians are rooting for a fascist government, that would "restore" their religious and caste elitism from 2000 years ago. This requires a constant dissemination of fake news and calls to violence, which Twitter is tagging as misleading information.

Hence, the anger in the comments and downvoting by upper caste folks of Indian origin.

Do you have Independent judiciary and media in your country?

I'm in the US, and although there are lots of things broken with the American media and government, I have full access to foreign media from anywhere in the world; no internet sites are censored.

So yes, I have independent media, because I can access the entire world's media and choose what I look at.

Then how does the below statement workout.

> Next thing you know they'll be blocking credible sites to spread their own misinformation agenda.

I assume courts will act against it, So that is not really a complaint.

> I assume courts will act against it

This is not a good assumption. I've seen lots of cases in the developed world where the courts do nothing.

I’m not sure how you could reach that conclusion that American media is independent. There is unprecedented political influence on social media (which actively censor civilly expressed contrarian opinions) and conventional media in the US, with increasing calls for state censorship by US congresspeople. It’s hard not to see the trend; it’s only a matter of time.

I think what I said was misinterpreted.

The American media is NOT independent.

But because at least the American government doesn't ban and censor websites, I effectively have independent media because I can look at any non-American media that I wish.

That's why I cautioned to not wish banning or censorship upon your own local law, wherever you are. If they are allowed the precedent of banning Facebook, they can also ban Al-Jazeera or BBC or DW or Wikipedia or whatever you wish to actually look at.

There are active calls by many Democrats for state censorship of websites like Breitbart, which, although I'm not a huge fan, do not call for violence of any sort. Also, I don't think it's fair to simply draw the line at "there are no laws banning specific media sources". It's hard to deny at this point that politicians are actively influencing and engaging with tech executives who are performing censorship. At this point, it's also a little difficult to claim that this is a trend that will change course or not accelerate.