A legendary French writer and philosopher by the name of VOLTAIRE once said and I quote I sometimes hate what

you write, but I will give to my death the right you have to write". Mornings when common people wake up to utterly discomforting news like that of a sarpanch beating up an innocent woman, ministers indulging in scams amounting to multiple crores and hundreds of ailing patients caught unaware in a hospital fire, it fills them up with rage and fury that is not comprehendible. Common people like you and me who if not for these social media sites, would have never had that basic platform to exercise that basic right to speech and expression entailed to us under article 19 of this constitution. Good morning everyone I am Gourab Ray and I will be speaking against the motion for this very contentious topic that has been debated upon and will be debated upon in the years to come over and over again. My worthy proponents of Internet censorship want strict control over this bludgeoning new crucible of information by basing their arguments on this medium for allowing indecent material and for encroaching upon communal sentiments and hurting moral ethics and Indian sensibilities but let me ask you should it be illegal to publish literature with "indecent" content on the Internet but perfectly legal to publish that same work in print? The Internet is unlike any information medium in history. The free flow of information that the Internet provides makes it a completely unprecedented information medium. My worthy opponents have tried to draw a parallel with the laws that exist for television and radio but the Internet regulations, such as the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition (CIEC), which assert that the Internet is not like a television and should not be regulated like one. Facebook, alike other social portals have been widely misinterpreted to be hosts and responsible for everything that is posted on them, instead the true fact is social media sites just act as platforms and not propagators of the thought. In fact with more than 800 million members on facebook, it has revolutionized how people communicate irrespective of their aristocracy, qualification and any other parameter; the pages are a crucible of knowledge and in itself it provides that platform that otherwise wouldnt have been possible to create and has made it possible to replace a floored meritocracy that was earlier vested only in the hands of the powerful. It has provided the masses the opportunity to be heard, amateur artists to get an audience and an opportunity to remodel society because I do not know the society that my opponents are trying to build for our future descendants but I surely will voice my opinion to make this place a better one to live in, a world free of errant politicians and those who sin. Unlike what my worthy opponents say, these portals have enhanced democracy by widening the public sphere and further equalizing political power. It has served as a means for

the mobilization of unprecedented numbers of people around various campaigns and causes: evidently visible during the presidential elections in Iran in 2009, the soumya vishwanath murder case, the priyadarshini mattoo murder case and the trial in the jessica lal murder case being the most popular and yet the elite of the government in power find it degrading to the society. My worthy opponents may talk about pre-screening, which in principle is impossible for any social networking site to achieve and also talk about bringing in separate domains to contain them but what they are seriously overlooking are the tedious sets of IT laws that already exist in the IPC of the Indian Constitution under section 66, which are just not laws but have set standards and examples for setting such laws in the developed world. In my opinion setting and bringing in more regulations is an insult to the judicial system and a mark on its incompetence that forms the fundamental block in a democracy. These are ladies and gentlemen, testing times for a sensitive, less mature and a diverse democracy like us. This issue relates to a constitutional issue of freedom of speech and expression and suppressing it was not possible as the right to freedom of speech in democratic India separates us from a totalitarian regime like China. What needs to be done is a systematic approach in expanding the global policies of non-interference that ISPs have, indulging in social mechanisms extending to the youth and adolescents, especially to the rotten section of the society vulnerable to vandalise moral ethics to drive people towards thoughtfulness and quality. Indulge in self-regulation mechanisms through academic and social institutions and bestow users with voluntary rating systems to decide what is apt. only these steps taken in the forward direction will yield results and simultaneously protect the rights of the people, the people who form the founding blocks of this constitution.