Boing Boing: BBC took down own Modi documentary from Internet Archive. “Twitter’s censorship is readily explained, but the documentary was also removed from the Internet Archive. The archive’s Chris Butler explains what happened: the BBC itself DMCAd it.”
Hollywood Reporter: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bows to India Request to Censor Links to BBC’s Narendra Modi Doc. “Despite the Twitter owner’s self-proclaimed stance as a ‘free speech absolutist,’ the platform has removed all links to videos from a documentary exploring allegations against Modi for fanning the flames of prejudice against Indian Muslims.”
The Hindu: Internet Archive takes down upload of BBC’s Modi documentary. “The Internet Archive, a US-based repository of webpage archives and media uploads by users around the world, has taken down a widely circulated upload of the first episode of the BBC’s The Modi Question, the documentary that was ordered off of YouTube and Twitter by the Union government, The Hindu has found.”
TechCrunch: India blocks YouTube videos and Twitter posts on BBC Modi documentary. “The Indian government has ordered YouTube and Twitter to take down videos and tweets about a BBC documentary that is critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”
New York Times: In India, Debunking Fake News and Running Into the Authorities. “Led by its founders, Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha, Alt News has criticized supporters and officials of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party for their statements targeting minorities. But in a reflection of the growing concerns about the independence and freedom of the news media in India, Mr. Zubair has landed in the authorities’ cross hairs.”
Columbia Journalism Review: Online censorship is growing in Modi’s India. “Using a combination of web scraping, APIs, and text extraction from hundreds of legal notices given to Twitter (sourced from the Lumen database, a Harvard University initiative monitoring global content removals), I created a series of datasets to better understand the nature and magnitude of the content that the Indian government wiped from Twitter.”
Coda Story: Kashmir’s vanishing newspaper archives. “In a long-troubled region of India, articles critical of the national government are being erased from the websites of local news outlets. Journalists believe that pressure from New Delhi is to blame.” Sounds like something Turkey would do.
BuzzFeed News: Big Tech Thought It Had A Billion Users In The Bag. Now It Might Be Forced To Make Hard Choices To Get Them.. “For months, the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, led by [Narendra] Modi, a nationalist autocrat accused of reshaping India’s secular ethos into a Hindu state, had been hard at work trying to quell an upswell of criticism on social media after a deadly second wave of the pandemic killed thousands and protests from millions of farmers against new agricultural laws rocked the nation. But it wasn’t until the last week of May that things came to a head.”
BuzzFeed News: As Indians Face A COVID-19 Crisis, Facebook Temporarily Hid Posts With #ResignModi. “Facebook temporarily hid posts calling for the resignation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, marking the platform’s latest foray in a series of controversial decisions affecting free speech in a country experiencing a full-blown COVID-19 crisis.”
New York Times: As Outbreak Rages, India Orders Critical Social Media Posts to Be Taken Down. “The new steps to muzzle online speech deepen a conflict between American social media platforms and Mr. Modi’s government. The two sides have tussled in recent months over a push by India’s government to more strictly police what is said online, a policy that critics say is being used to silence government detractors.”
CNN: Modi declares victory in India’s first coronavirus election as cases soar in country’s capital. “Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has claimed victory in the country’s first major state election held during the pandemic. Results from the Election Commission of India show that Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its coalition partners have returned to power after a tight race for control of the legislative assembly in Bihar, the country’s third most populous state with more than 100 million people.”
Greater Kashmir: Man held for posting morphed pictures of PM on social media. “A man has been arrested here in Madhya Pradesh for allegedly posting morphed photographs of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and obscene comments on a social media platform, police said on Sunday.”
Business Insider India: Chinese social media deletes Modi’s remarks on border row. “Known for government control and censorship, Chinese social media has now removed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech and India’s official statements on the border row.”
Huffington Post: EXCLUSIVE: Documents Show Modi Govt Building 360 Degree Database To Track Every Indian. “The Narendra Modi government is in the final stages of creating an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents, previously undisclosed government documents reviewed by HuffPost India establish.”
Quartz: Facebook political ads show Modi is still king of social media in India. “If India’s 2019 parliamentary polls were to be judged entirely by the political advertisements on Facebook, it is all about economics. These ads have predominantly focused on the economy and development. It’s even more clear who is grabbing the limelight: Prime minister Narendra Modi’s name features in far more of these ads than those of his rivals and allies.”
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