Dangerous Speech in Real Time: Social Media, Policing, and Communal Violence

By: Siddharth Narrain

EPW: 24th August, 2017

The article examines how a set of key actors—the police, civil society and social media platforms
responded to a series of violent incidents in Pune in 2014 that resulted in the death of Mohsin
Sheikh. The hate speech by the Hindu Rashtra Sena leaders; the murder of Sheikh; violence and
arson against Muslims; the circulation of morphed images; the actions of the police and civil
society groups, were all part of an ecosystem of events that occurred at the time. What is new
here, when compared to earlier incidents of communal violence is the technology being used—
social media through internet enabled mobile phones. This in turn raises a number of legal and
technological questions that need to be investigated further.

The Bombay High Court’s reasoning in an order granting bail to three of the accused in the
murder of Mohsin Sheikh, a 28 year-old IT professional who was killed during communal
violence in Pune in 2014[i], has raised a number of legal and ethical questions. Justice Mridula
Bhatkar’s decision primarily revolves around four factors: the accused did not have any previous
convictions, many of the co-accused in the case had already been granted bail, the victim was
easily recognisable as Muslim, and related to this was the factor that the accused had been
present at a meeting where Dhananjay Desai, a co-accused in the case and a maverick leader of
an outfit called the Hindu Rashtra Sena (HRS), had just made a provocative speech.

In 2014, members of the Bharatiya Janta Party, Shiv Sena and the HRS went on a rampage in
Pune and other parts of Maharashtra using the pretext of morphed images, including those of
Shivaji and the late leader of the Shiv Sena Bal Thackeray, on social media (Katakam 2014).
Narratives trace the violent incidents back to a Facebook profile called Dharamveer Shree
Sambhaji Maharaj which allegedly carried derogatory pictures of Shivaji, Thackeray, Ganesha,
and Sambhaji Maharaj and that it led to a violent mob damaging 12 buses in Chinchwad (Ansari
2014). The news around this violence spread quickly through Whatsapp, leading to stone pelting
and false alarms. A photograph of Nikhil Tikone, a young man from Kasba Peth, made the
rounds on Whatsapp portrayed as that of one “Nihal Khan”, the person supposed to have made
the allegedly derogatory Facebook post (Ansari 2014).

The Maharashtra state government deployed a large number of police personnel, including
members of the State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) to control the violence. They also got the
Facebook post removed through the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In),
the national nodal agency responsible for cyber security authorised under section 70-B of the
Information Technology Act (Ansari 2014).
Mohsin Sheikh was killed on the night of 2 June 2014 in Hadapsar, two days after
demonstrations against the circulation of the morphed images began. More than 12 people were
injured in the violence (Ansari 2014). In a span of a few days, more than 250 government buses
were burnt, and Muslim businesses, madrasas and mosques were attacked in Hadapsar. The
Hadapsar police arrested 21 persons in this case of whom 11 were granted bail between April
and June 2016. Dhananjay Desai was refused bail, and remains behind bars in Yeravada prison.

Justice Bhatkar’s logic of how the accused were provoked to murder Sheikh, is a perverse
inversion of the relationship between speech and violent action that we are familiar with.Much of
the debate regarding speech and violent action has been centred on whether arresting or
criminalising a person for speech that allegedly results in violence, is justified or not. The court’s
deployment of the markers of Sheikh’s Muslim identity—his pastel green coloured shirt and
beard—as a means of arguing that the accused did not have any personal enmity with the victim,
is extremely disturbing. Surely a crime committed because of someone’s religious identity
cannot be viewed as less serious than one based on purely personal reasons. If such an incident
had happened in other jurisdictions, such as the United States (US), it would have been
categorised as a hate crime, where injury or death caused because of a person’s actual or
perceived colour, race, religion or national origin, attracts a maximum sentence of life
imprisonment. This bail order brings to the fore the vexed question of the relationship between
the speech act and acts of violence, especially in cases of communally charged speech, which I
refer to as “dangerous speech”. The legal scholar Susan Benesch and her colleagues have been
grappling with the idea of dangerous speech, which is a subset of public speech and has the
capacity of increasing the risk of group violence. Benesch’s concern comes from examples such
as the genocide in Rwanda, where mass violence was preceded by speech that vilified and
dehumanised the Tutsi community.

Benesch and other scholars, such as Jonathan Maynard, do not think of “dangerous speech” as a
new crime that they are defining, but as a framework to understand how such speech can become
an important catalyst during mass violence. They advocate strongly non-legal measures such as
counter speech to address dangerous speech, and highlight the dangers of criminalisation of
dangerous speech. Criminal laws, while framed as tackling dangerous speech, are often used to
muzzle political and other dissent, and can backfire as a strategy, often giving more publicity to
the speaker (Maynard and Benesch 2016). I find this framework of dangerous speech a useful
point of reference to discuss the events in Pune in 2014 and to describe the content on social
media that was circulated during, and as a precursor to communal violence, and is widely
believed to have served as a catalyst for communal tensions, and violence in the incidents I
describe.

As per the dangerous speech framework, the factors that may increase the risk of speech leading
to atrocities include the influence of the speaker; whether the audience has grievances and fears
that the speaker can cultivate; a speech act that is clearly understood as a call to violence; a social
or historical context that is propitious for violence; and a means of dissemination that is
influential in itself (Benesch 2012). It is this last factor, the means of dissemination, specifically
the circulation of material on social media in the lead up to, and during communal violence in
India that I focus on in this paper.

Social Media and Communal and Ethnic Violence

The 2014 violence in Pune is one in a series of communal and ethnic violence in India in the
post-2012 period, where content circulating through internet-enabled mobile phones and on
social media, has reconfigured the way in which the law, police, and civil society have grappled
with this issue. The term social media has been defined as referring to both a) sites and services
that emerged globally in the 2000s including social networking sites, video sharing and blogging
platforms that allow users to share and post their content and b) the cultural mindset that
emerged in the mid 2000s as part of the technical phenomenon called Web 2.0 (Boyd 2014).

I have used the term broadly in this paper to include SMSes and MMSes sent during the exodus
of persons from the North East in 2012, and instant messaging platforms such as Whatsapp,
referred to as Over the Top (OTT) content.

In August 2012, the circulation of threatening SMSs and MMSs in Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai
and other cities with a sizeable population of persons from the North East, was one of the first
incidents where the configuration involving dangerous speech, social media and public disorder
became visible.. Thousands of persons from the North East, many of whom were workers in the
service industry and students, fled these cities fearing for their physical safety.

Circulating at the time were images related to violence against Muslims in Assam, where in May
2014, Bodo militants had killed 32 Muslims in the Baksa and Kokrajhar districts). These images
were accompanied with messages threatening retaliatory violence against persons from the North
East living in cities like Bengaluru.[ii]

The reportage by newspapers in the North East about the threats in Bengaluru further fueled
panic, with many parents asking their children who were studying in cities like Bengaluru to
return home. Such was the scale of panic that the Indian Railways arranged for nine special
trains to Guwahati as thousands of people gathered at the Bengaluru railway station, desperate to
go.

The central government responded to the serious situation by blocking bulk SMSs, a number of
websites, twitter accounts, blogposts and blogs that were related to communal issues and rioting
(Prakash 2012).Free speech activists have pointed out that despite its best intentions, the
government’s actions were marred by procedural irregularities and overreach.[iii] In Uttar
Pradesh in 2013, the circulation of a video portraying the brutal lynching of two men by a mob,
which is now believed to be that of a lynching in Sialkot, Pakistan, played an important role in
the events leading up to the Muzaffarnagar riots in August-September 2013. More than 60
people were killed and more than 50,000 displaced in the riots. The accompanying text and audio
messages falsely claimed that the video was of a group of Muslims lynching two Hindus in
Kawal, where two Hindu men and a Muslim man had been killed as a result of a confrontation
over an alleged incident of eve teasing.

The circulation of this video played an important role in the mobilising of the Jat community, as
well as in creating an atmosphere of distrust among people in the region. According to
newspaper reports, the Vishnu Sahai Commission Report, instituted by the Uttar Pradesh
government to investigate the riots, states that the circulation of the Kawal video, was a
significant factor in the events leading up to the riots. The report indicts Sangeet Som, the
Bharatiya Janata Party’s Member of Legislative Assembly from Sardhana in Meerut district, who
has been charged under section 153A of the IPC for sharing the Kawal video on his Facebook
page (Raghuvanshi 2015).

Policing Social Media in Pune

There was intense media scrutiny was directed at the actions of the government and police
during the communal violence in Pune because the violence had occurred just after the BJP’s
sweeping victory in the 2014 general elections. Many people feared that the political changes at
the centre would lead to a rise in anti-Muslim speech, and heighten communal tensions[iv]

After the outbreak of violence on 31 May 2014 in Pune, members of civil society, worried about
the fallout of the riots and the continued communal tensions in the area. They began to address
the circulation of morphed and incendiary images that they felt had vitiated the atmosphere in the
city. A group of citizens in Pune who called themselves the Social Peace Force (SPF) had
formed a group on Facebook in 2013. They had worked together towards relief efforts during a
drought in the region.[v] As an immediate response to the outbreak of violence in May 2014,
they evolved a novel, but effective method of addressing the material that was circulating on
social media at the time. On their Facebook page, members of the SPF described themselves as a
youth group to stop anti-social messages on Facebook. They took on the role of civil society
watchdogs, and began monitoring content on social media, both to try and get material taken
down, as well as to educate the public about the use of social media. While their Facebook group
had more than 20,000 members at the time, they formed a core group of 10 persons who
examined online content for what they deemed dangerous in the context of the ongoing
communal tensions and violence. In order to identify this material, they searched for terms such
as “Ambedkar”, “Sita”, “Shivaji”, etc, in multiple spellings and pronunciations. Once they
identified such posts on Facebook, they called upon their larger Facebook group to identify this
content as spam (Hindistan Times 2014).

On their Facebook page, the SPF state that they will not “Like” or “Comment” but will report
spam as it is the easiest technological method of fighting those spreading “anti-national”
messages and images. They state their mission as responding to those trying to dismantle “our
social thread of unity and integrity and try to destroy our multi-cultural peaceful living, then,
why not a group of youths with a noble cause, try to spread peace and huminity amongst the FB
users and the society at large? [sic]” [vi]

The SPF members were worried that their communication while identifying and responding to
such dangerous speech could have technically been interpreted as a violation of section 66A of
the Information Technology Act (which was in force at the time, and which was struck down as
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2015). They thus involved the Pune Cyber Crime Cell
and the then Maharashtra Minister of State for Home Satej Patil, who became members of their
Facebook Group. This model was widely seen as a useful approach in tackling the situation.
Anand Shinde, the SPF member I interviewed, said that Facebook publicly cited the SPF's effort
as a successful intervention.[vii]

However, the SPF’s methods drew sharp criticism from the film critic and commentator Shobha
De,[viii] the South Asia desk of Human Rights Watch, and the sociologist Nandini Sardesai.
They considered these actions as another form of moral policing, with the danger of what is
considered offensive becoming a matter of subjective choice. The Social Peace Force’s had said
that they did not discriminate on what kind of offensive content was taken down. “If a God’s
image is replaced with a model’s body, we would identify this as bad. We did not discriminate
based on religion”, said one of its members.[ix]

The Pune police adopted the SPF’s methods, and actively collaborated with them to address
what they deemed as dangerous speech. Besides Facebook, the Pune Cyber Crime Cell actively
tracked material that was circulating on Whatsapp. They created a number of Whatsapp groups
with representatives of the locality, prominent citizens and members of local societies, police
chowkis, and social workers and politicians from the area. Around 3,300 police officers were
added to these groups to help track content that was circulating and to keep a tab on the
happenings. Citizens were also asked to report incidents where“objectionable”’ content was
being circulated to the police, for which the police created an online reporting system where
anyone could post urls of offensive or objectionable content.[x] These measures became
especially important with a platform like Whatsapp, which is not publicly accessible. The only
way for the police to track content on Whatsapp was when someone brought it to their attention,
or when they were themselves part of groups in which this material circulated.

The Pune police in turn used bulk SMSes, email, Twitter and Whatsapp to send out messages
and police combined their efforts online with more traditional measures at educating people on
the use of social media through programmes that they conducted in schools, colleges, housing
societies, public spaces, community halls. They invited politicians and leaders of civil society
organisations. They collaborated actively with IT experts, social activists, teachers and other
citizens. The police printed posters that urged people not to “like” or “dislike” images and
content that was communally sensitive, and not to post, comment, share or forward such
material. They created films, organised debates and lectures on this theme, and held interactions
with elderly people and parents.[xi]
For the Pune police, the SPF Facebook group became an important site of intervention. On the
group page, members not only identified material that was “objectionable” but also posted
”responsible” messages and comments. As per the police, they had messages taken off social
media sites and blocked websites, after going through the legal process and the CERT- In.[xii]

The collaboration between the police and the Social Peace Force to tackle dangerous speech
online raises important questions on the viability and dangers of such an approach. While no
doubt extremely effective, such an approach could be described as social media vigilantism since
it did not have clear guidelines on what kind of speech was considered unacceptable. However,
given the importance of a real time response in such a serious situation of communal violence,
where the threat of the loss of life and property were important considerations, it is important to
acknowledge this as a novel model that civil society and the police experimented with. In any
case, the Pune police and the Social Peace Force were not the ones who ultimately took down the
content. Their role here was to flag content as unacceptable and notify the social media platform
concerned, in this case Facebook. In that sense, it is the social media platform which has the
responsibility to ensure transparency, accountability and a system of rules and guidelines that
users can recognise as standards, and which when enforced in a regularised fashion can begin to
act as precedents.

Friction between Social Media Platforms and Law Enforcement

In 2014 Pune, there were also instances when the SPF was not successful in taking down
material. . For instance, they were unsuccessful in persuading Facebook in taking down a video
in which people who claimed to be part of a religious group said they would bomb areas in
Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi and other cities. .[xiii] This is not an isolated incident. The public
order concerns of law enforcement are in tension with the free positions of social media
platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter who in many of these cases tend to tilt towards
protecting freedom of speech and retaining material online. In India there seems to be much
informal negotiation that happens between these platforms and the police, along with formal
mechanisms through which they interact with each other.

For many years now, law enforcement agencies in India have been asking that internet platforms
follow the Indian law, including the provisions of the Information Technology Act, and speech
related to criminal law, which has a relatively wide ambit as well as a history of misuse, as the
controversy over section 66A and its subsequent striking down has shown. Internet platforms
such as Facebook and Google are headquartered in the US, and follow a more liberal standard
laid down by American First Amendment law. This has resulted in a friction between successive
Indian governments and internet platforms, and often tied the hands of law enforcement agencies
when it comes to enforcing Indian law that regulates content on social media.

If law enforcement agencies want to remove content from a social media site like Facebook and
Google who are based in the US, and the social media platform refuses to do so, they can go
through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) process. MLAT is a formal way in which
law enforcement from one country can get assistance related to evidence related to internet
records for criminal investigations and proceedings in a foreign country.[xiv] The MLAT
process involves multiple U S agencies including the Departments of Justice, State and
Commerce. Due to the increasing number of requests for computer records, the workload has not
kept pace with the demand, which means that there is no clear timetable once a request is put in.
Many police officers in India are not happy with this situation.[xv], This is one of the reasons
that the Indian government has been pushing for internet platforms to locate their servers in the
country, which they claim will help address dangerous speech in real time.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have their own internal
mechanisms meant to address the problem of dangerous speech. In recent years, because of
increasing pressure from a number of governments, especially from governments in Europe,
these companies have strengthened these internal mechanisms. Google, for instance has
instituted a flagging mechanism on YouTube where users can flag content that violates
YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Since 2000, more than 92,000 videos have been taken down
as a result of community members flagging content.[xvi] Facebook has set up an Online Civil
Courage Initiative that works in collaboration with non government organising in Germany,
France and UK to tackle hate speech on the platform. Twitter has instituted a Trust and Safety
Council, which works with academics, advocates and researchers to tackle harassing and harmful
speech.[xvii]

These platforms are also investing in local language expertise, and new technologies to identify
and root out speech that does not meet their internal standards. For instance, Jigsaw (formerly
Google Ideas), a technology incubator created by Google, is investing in artificial intelligence
that will make keyword searches more accurate, and has been testing an algorithm that will help
identify such keywords in the comments section of websites.[xviii]

Facebook now provides numbers over a six monthly period related to government requests for
data as well as requests to take down content. However this information is cursory. It involves
the overall numbers related to government requests but not how they follow them up, how many
of these have been dealt with, whether they are accepted or not, or the reasoning behind
facebook’s decisions. In the period between January and June 2016, the majority of content to
which access has been restricted in response to legal requests from law enforcement agencies and
CERT-In was regarding violation of Indian laws related to anti-religious speech and hate
speech.[xix] After the Supreme Court decision in the Shreya Singhal judgment, Facebook has
stated that they will not remove content unless received by a binding court order or notification
from an authorised agency which conforms to the constitutional safeguards laid down by the
court.[xx] Similarly, Google’s Transparency Reports provides details of the numbers of requests
from governments and courts to remove content.

From a free speech perspective, the fact that most governments do not wield direct influence on
social media platforms, taking down content is an important protection for users of these
platforms, especially for dissenting and minority voices. At the same time, it is important for
these platforms to make the process and guidelines through which they evaluate content more
transparent, so that users, police and civil society actors have a clearer sense of what kind of
material is likely to be taken down. This in turn could limit dangers of internet vigilantism, while
at the same time, helping to tackle dangerous speech on their platforms.

Social Media Labs and Infrastructures of Monitoring

The Pune Cyber Crime Cell, which played a key role in the response to the communal violence
in the city in 2014, reports to the police commissioner and its jurisdiction extends to the entire
city. In 2015, out of the requests the cyber crime cell received, around 15% deal with hate
speech/objectionable material. The vast majority of these requests (around 50%) dealt with
online financial fraud and what are referred to as “419” emails, that is, advance fee scams where
mass emails are sent asking for money and financial assistance.

The Pune cyber cell is involved in two types of activities—criminal investigation post an event
as well as active monitoring of information through ISP based monitoring, website content
filtering, keyword filtering and user identification, both of which could lead to requests to block
or delete posts and content.[xxi] Post the events of 2014, a bulk of the cyber cell’s work has been
to monitor information—to track persons actively using hate speech through key words, tracking
who they are friends with online, what groups they are on, the other people who are on these
groups, and other publicly available information such as their public Facebook posts. For this,
they use a method they term link analysis. As of August 2015, the police continued to have a
presence on Whatsapp groups, and citizens were still able to post messages with the police,
giving urls of offensive or objectionable content .The Cyber Cell continued to actively
collaborate with IT companies and cyber specialists.

In March 2016, the Pune police inaugurated a Social Media Monitoring Laboratory that is meant
to monitor ”unlawful activity” on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
(Times of India 2016). As per newspaper reports, the lab would have 18 police personnel
working in shifts round the clock to identify hate speech and take prompt action before
complaints are received from the public. They will also respond to complaints from the
government and the public (Times of India 2016).

The Pune social media monitoring laboratory is modeled on existing social media labs in
Mumbai and in Uttar Pradesh at Meerut and Lucknow. The Mumbai Social Media Lab (MSML)
was set up in 2013 in collaboration with the National Association of Software and Services
Companies (NASSCOM), the Data Security Council of India (DSCI), and Reliance (Hindustan
Times 2014). Set up in 2004, and inaugurated by Bollywood star Abhishek Bachchan, the
MSML was set up as an immediate response to the massive mobilisation of protestors as well as
public anger around the December 2012 Jyoti Singh Pandey rape incident, much of which
occurred on social media. While the Mumbai police have publicly stated that the MSML would
only monitor material that would be available in the public domain (Hindustan Times 2016),
these technological developments in police surveillance, and the use of these methods by states
and the centre[xxii] are bound to attract ethical and legal scrutiny (Datta 2015).

The setting up of these labs marks an institutional move where the police are increasingly and
actively monitoring content on social media to prevent and predict events , rather than merely
investigating after an event. Part of the reason for this is that tracking material on social media is
becoming more difficult, given the contentious issues around jurisdiction, and the ease with
which a media file can move from one platform to another, enabled by the ubiquitous mobile
phone. Audio files, videos, photographs and text move seamlessly between platforms such as
Whatsapp, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, making it difficult for the police to track
the origins of such material post an event. It is not surprising then that in the Pune riots, while 21
persons have been arrested for acts of violence, including the murder of Sheikh, no one has been
identified or arrested for circulating objectionable material and hate speech.

Conclusion

The emergence of social media as a key site for the circulation of images, text and audio files,
through internet enabled mobile phones throws up important questions for law and governance.
The Sheikh bail order, with its warped logic, deals with a more traditional situation. The chain of
events outlined by Justice Bhatkar in the bail order begins with a gathering where Dhananjay
Desai and others make provocative speeches in a communally charged atmosphere. The accused,
who were present at the meeting, go on a violent rampage, and murderSheikh. The assumption
the judge makes is that the provocative speech, made in a highly charged atmosphere, influenced
the listeners to perform a series of violent acts. In the case of communal violence in Pune of
2014, the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013, the violence at Azad Maidan, Mumbai in 2012, and the
exodus of persons from the North east from cities such as Bangalore and Pune in 2012, the police
have charged, arrested or even identified those responsible for acts of violence or making
provocative speeches, but have not been able to track dangerous speech circulating as videos,
images or text to a definite source. The transnational flow of information, the ease of inter-
platform exchange, and the speed and scale with which information travels, has meant that the
police’s focus is shifting to limiting the circulation of dangerous speech on social media, and
efforts at predicting violence by monitoring and tracking people online.

These characteristics of the media environment can be termed affordances as they make possible
and sometimes encourage certain kinds of practices, even though they do not determine what
practices will unfold (Boyd 2014). The media scholar Dana Boyd points to four affordances that
influence the mediated environments created by social media: 1) persistence: the durability of
online expressions and content; 2) visibility: the potential audience who can bear witness 3)
spreadability: the ease with which content can be shared 4) searchability: the ability to find
content (ibid).

The relatively low cost of smart phones, most of which are sold with Whatsapp and Facebook
installed on them, the enormous popularity of both these platforms in India, the ease with which
photographs, video and audio recordings can be made through mobile phones, the ability to
morph and tinker with content, the ease of movement of media objects across social media
platforms, the ability and impulse to forward material, and the potential of media objects to go
viral online, blurs the boundary between private and public speech. These affordances raise
important questions for the law, including relooking at traditional notions and expectations of
“private” and ”public” space, and how one understands proximity of speech acts to violence,
which in turn has implications for the exercise of freedom of speech (Narrain, Sheshu 2016).

The SPF’s intelligent use of Facebook’s spam function in Pune to combat dangerous speech on
social media is an example of how they leveraged the affordances available for their own goals.
Not only did the Pune police collaborate with the SPF in this effort, it also used traditional means
such as community interventions, counter propaganda, and efforts at educating the public to
show restraint in circulating dangerous speech at the time of communal violence in the city in
2014.

Another example is the use of OTT platforms such as Whatsapp in the mobilisation of crowds,
and in the circulation of dangerous speech. They are end to end encrypted and not ordinarily
accessible to law enforcement, which has triggered a heavy handed approach from state
governments. Where earlier, the police identified and blocked websites that they considered
objectionable under the Blocking Rules of the IT Act, they are now increasingly resorting to
banning the internet completely in geographically specified areas. According to statistics
gathered by the Software Freedom Law Centre, there have been more than 60 incidents of
internet bans in various parts of the country in the period between 2012 and 2017, most of which
have been done through the use of section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), the
provision related to unlawful assembly that is usually invoked by police to control and prevent
riots, and other public order disturbances.[xxiii]

This trend towards internet bans reflects a global phenomenon. In July 2016, the United Nations
Human Rights Council passed a resolution expressing concern about measures that were meant
to disrupt access to, or the dissemination of information online.[xxiv] The resolution also
stressed the importance of combating “advocacy of hatred that constituted incitement to
discrimination or violence on the Internet.”[xxv] In Gujarat, the legality of the government’s
decision to shut down the internet in many towns during the Patidar agitation in 2015 was
challenged in the High Court.[xxvi] The petitioner, a law student, argued that the use of section
144 CrPC to shut down the internet was unconstitutional, and that the correct approach would
have been to block offending sites using the blocking provisions under the IT Act. The Gujarat
High Court upheld the legality of the internet ban holding that the ban was not a blanket one as it
only shutdown mobile internet while allowing internet over broadband. The court held that the
serious public order situation warranted such government action.

Another visible trend is the targeting of moderators of groups on Whatsapp, and other such OTT
platforms. The police have arrested a number of such persons for posts on their group
(Shubhomoy 2015). While this question has not been decided in courts when it comes to criminal
cases, recently, in a civil defamation claim, the Delhi High Court held that an administrator of
Telegram (an OTT platform like Whatsapp (Rashid 2016)or Google Groups could not be held
responsible for defamatory statements made on the group.[xxvii]

In Kashmir, where restrictions on internet access and strict rules regarding mobile connections
have been regularly enforced over the last five years, the state government announced in April
2016 that all Whatsapp groups in the Kashmir valley that shared news amongst users must
register with district authorities. This was in response d to the violence triggered by allegations
of army personnel having molested a minor girl in Handwara town in Kupwara district.
Following this, the district magistrate of Kupwara appointed the additional district information
officer as the nodal authority to register Whatsapp news groups, and to monitor their activities
(Rashid 2016). The state government also announced that its employees would not be allowed to
criticise and comment on official policies on Whatsapp, and that group administrators would be
made responsible for rumours spread using Whatsapp (ibid). While it is unclear how feasible it is
to implement the state government’s announcements, these developments alert us to the dense
thicket of ethical, political and legal issues that these measures throw up.

The focus on limiting circulation of content on social media to tackle dangerous speech, rather
than prosecuting such speech post publication has to do with the difficulty in tracking the content
back to a single author or a source, and in tracking content across national borders. However, this
shift raises troubling questions around the dangers of police profiling, breach of privacy, and the
muzzling of dissent, democratic mobilisation and political speech. There needs to be more
discussion on the safeguards and oversight mechanisms that are needed to ensure that such a
shift does not lead to an abuse of police and state power.

In this article I have examined how a set of key actors like the police and civil society and social
media platforms have responded to these change in the context of a series of violent incidents in
Pune in 2014 that resulted in the death of Sheikh. Sheikh worked as an IT manager with a private
firm in Pune, one of India’s leading hub for IT, start–ups and research institutions. The
developments I have described in this paper are circumscribed by local and regional techno-
social factors, including the availability of technical expertise in this domain, and the police’s
infrastructure and ability to capitalise on this.

The use of the term dangerous speech is an acknowledgement of the relationship between speech
and violence, while at the same time narrowing down the scope of speech to a much smaller
subset of public speech, than, for example, the term hate speech which would cover a much
wider range of speech that denigrates and perpetuates discrimination against people in a group.
The stress on non-legal measures to tackle such speech outside of the criminal law, make this
framework suitable to communal violence in India, since the penal provisions such as sections
153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code that are meant to protect against incendiary speech, are
often used to censor, harass and curtail free speech and expression. The focus of the dangerous
speech framework on the various factors at play, particularly the means and medium of
dissemination, lend to examining the rapid changes in the design and architecture of the media
environment in India, particularly how the affordances that have shaped the mediated
environment created by social media, have reconfigured the way in which media, law and
technology interact.
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Notes

[i] Vijay Gambhire v. The State of Maharashtra with Ranjeet Yadav v. The State of Maharashtra
and Ajay Dilip Lalge v. The State of Maharashtra, order dated 12 January 2017

[ii] The author lived in Bangalore at the time of these incidents, and was part of an initiative
called the North east Solidarity Forum, a network of civil society organizations that started a
helpline to intervene on behalf of persons from the North East, as well as Tibetans, and others
affected by the threats at the time.

[iii] The Blocking Rules under section 69A of the Information Technology Act require that
persons and intermediaries hosting the content should have been notified and provided 48 hours
to respond (under Rule 8 of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking
for Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009). Under the emergency provision (Rule 9), the
block issued has to be introduced before the "Committee for Examination of Request" within 48
hours, and the committee has to notify the persons and intermediaries hosting the content. See
Prakash 2012.

[iv] Interview with Anand Shinde, 9 Sep 2015.

[v] A group led by Ravi Ghate formed the Drought Help Group on Facebook. They held a press
conference and invited people to join their efforts and got 50 volunteers. They did not deal with
money directly but matched the requirements of affected people (pipelines, farm tanks, sanitation
etc.) with donations. They did this using Whatsapp and Facebook.

[vi] See https://www.facebook.com/groups/SocialPeaceForce/

[vii] Interview with Anand Shinde, Pune, 9 Sep 2015

[viii] Interview with Anand Shinde, Pune, 9 Sep 2015

[ix] Interview with Anand Shinde, Pune, 9 Sep 2015

[x] Interviews with Dr. Sanjay Tungar, Cyber Crime Cell, Crime Branch, Pune, 9 September
2015 and with Manoj Patil, Deputy Commissioner of Police Pune, 10 September 2015

[xi] Interview with Manoj Patil, Deputy Commissioner of Police Pune, 10 September 2015
[xii] Ibid

[xiv] http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/presentation-on-mlats.pdf, accessed on 21

February 2017

[xv] See https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2014/07/13/mut-le....

[xvi] Speech by Chetan Krishnaswamy, Country Head, Public Policy, Google India, at the
launch of Software Freedom Law Centre’s report “Online Harassment: A Form of Censorship,”
22 November 2016, New Delhi.

[xvii] See https://about.twitter.com/safety/council, accessed on 21 February 2017

[xviii] Speech by Chetan Krishnaswamy, Country Head, Public Policy, Google India, at the
launch of Software Freedom Law Centre’s report “Online Harassment: A Form of Censorship,”
22 November 2016, New Delhi.

[xix] See https://govtrequests.facebook.com/country/India/2016-H1/.

[xx] Ibid

[xxi] Interview with Sanjay Tungar, Cyber Crime Cell, Crime Branch, Pune, 9 September 2015.

[xxii] The Central Government has proposed a National Media Analytics Centre (NMAC),
which appears to have a much wider ambit than the social media labs discussed in this paper.
Besides highlight “belligerent comments” on social media that could lead to public order
disturbances and protests, the proposed NMAC will analyse blogs, social media posts and web
portals of television channels and newspapers and help the government counter negative
publicity, and factually correct “intentional canards”. See Ranjan (2016).

[xxiii] See Software Freedom Law Centre, “Internet Shutdowns in India Since 2012”, updated on
6 February 2017, http://sflc.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/InternetShutDowns_Feb7, 2017.pdf,.
Also See Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University Delhi, Legally India,
14 July 2016, “Internet Shutdowns: An Update, http://www.legallyindia.com/blogs/internet-
shutdowns-an-update.

[xxiv] See United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution on The Promotion, Protection and
Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet, A/HRC/32/L.20, passed on 1 July 2016,
https://www.article19.org/data/files/Internet_Statement_Adopted.pdf, accessed on 23 February
2017

[xxv] Ibid

[xxvi] Gaurav Sureshbhai Vyas v. State of Gujarat, Writ Petition (PIL) No. 191 of 2015
[xxvii] Ashish Bhalla v. Suresh Chawdhury & Ors., CS (OS) No. 188/2016, IA No. 4901/2016,
IA No. 8988/2016, IA No. 9553/2016, IA No. 9554/2016 & IA No. 11830/2016, decided on 20
November 2016