I want us to consider the implications of this new
reality: In three of the four most populous countries in the world, governments
have now given themselves the power to order that the internet be wiped of
citizens’ posts that authorities do not like.
اضافة اعلان
Indonesia — the world’s fourth-most populous country, and a
democracy — is in the process of implementing what civil rights organizations
say are overly broad regulations to demand removal of online speech that
officials consider a disturbance to society or public order. Most major
internet companies, including
Google, Meta, Netflix,
TikTok, Apple, and Twitter
have effectively agreed to go along with the rules, for now.
Indonesia’s regulations are another sign that strict online
controls are no longer confined to autocratic countries like
China, Iran, North
Korea, and Myanmar. They are also increasingly the realm of democracies that want
to use the law and the internet to shape citizens’ discussions and beliefs.
In free societies, there has long been a tug of war over
free speech and its limits. But one of the enduring questions of the online era
is what governments, digital companies and citizens should do now that the
internet and social media make it both easier for people to share their truth
(or their lies) with the world and more appealing for national leaders to shut
it all down.
What is happening in three of the world’s four largest
countries — China, India, and Indonesia; the
US is the third largest — is
simpler than that. It fits the classic definition of censorship. Governments
are seeking to silence their external critics.
Officials in Indonesia have said that their new regulations
are needed to protect people’s privacy, delete online material that promotes
child sexual abuse or terrorism, and make the internet a welcoming space to
all.
Governments sometimes have legitimate reasons to shape what
happens online, such as preventing the spread of dangerous misinformation. But
Dhevy Sivaprakasam, Asia Pacific policy counsel for the global digital rights
group Access Now, said Indonesia’s rules are a fig leaf used by the government
to stifle journalism and citizen protests, with few checks on that power.
The regulations require digital companies, including social
media sites, digital payment, and video game companies and messaging apps to
constantly scan for online material that violates the law and pull it down
within hours if discovered. Authorities also have the right to request user
data, including people’s communications and financial transactions. Companies
that fail to comply with the law can be fined or forced to stop operating in
the country.
Indonesia’s regulations, which have not been applied yet,
“raise serious concerns for the rights to freedom of expression, association,
information, privacy, and security,” Sivaprakasam said.
Access Now has also called out other sweeping online
censorship laws in Asia, including those in
Vietnam, Bangladesh, and India.
It gets more complicated trying to decide what to do about
these laws. Companies in technology and other industries tend to say they are
required to comply with the laws of the countries in which they operate, but
they do push back sometimes, or even pull out of countries such as Russia,
arguing that the laws or governments’ interpretations of them violate people’s
fundamental freedoms.
Access Now and other rights groups have said that companies
should not bow to what they say are violations of international human rights
and other norms in Indonesia.
Executives of US internet companies have said privately that
the US government should do more to stand up to overly strict government
controls over online expression, rather than leave it up to Google, Apple,
Meta, and Twitter alone. They say US companies should not be put in a position
of trying to independently defend citizens of other countries from abuses by
their own governments.
The original, utopian idea of the internet was that it would
help tear down national boundaries and give citizens abilities they had never
before had to challenge their governments. We saw a version of that, but then
governments wanted more control over what happened online. “Governments are
very powerful, and they don’t like to be displaced,” Mishi Choudhary, a lawyer
who works on the rights of internet users in India, told me last year.
Our challenge, then, is to make room for governments to act
in the public interest to shape what happens online when necessary, while
calling them out when authorities abuse this right in order to maintain their
own power.
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