India’s Teflon prime minister
Elon Musk is throwing red meat to the free speech absolutist crowd, claiming that principles “matter more than profit.” The target of Musk’s ire is a Brazilian Supreme Court judge who reportedly ordered X to “block certain popular accounts” without explaining why. X characterized the order as unconstitutional and Musk demanded that the judge either “resign or be impeached.” Local Brazilian news outlets reported that some of the blocked accounts were known supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The Brazilian judiciary is conducting an exhaustive investigation into the events of January 8, 2023, when supporters of Bolsonaro rioted in the Brazilian capital after his defeat in the general election. At the same time, a bill proposed last year would put the onus on tech companies to report and remove disinformation and illegal content from their platforms. Companies, including Facebook and Google, have claimed that the proposed law could lead to censorship and the stifling of free speech. Musk, who has used X to push right-wing conspiracies, has said he will defy Brazilian court orders to protect free speech. But in his time at the helm of X, Musk has complied with more government requests to block content than his predecessors.
Brazil’s contention in its bid to regulate platforms is that they need to take more responsibility for the spread of disinformation, which can have devastating consequences for democracies. Microsoft released a “threat intelligence” report last week that claimed “as populations in India, South Korea and the United States head to the polls, we are likely to see Chinese cyber and influence actors, and to some extent North Korean cyber actors, work toward targeting these elections.” The threat, Microsoft says, of actually swaying voters is low, but the disinformation campaigns are a valuable testing ground for memes that stick. The intelligence report was released just as Microsoft was at the end of a scolding from a U.S. government committee that described the tech giant’s security as “inadequate.” Microsoft’s “cascade of avoidable errors” resulted in allegedly state-backed Chinese hackers breaking into the email accounts of senior U.S. officials. A threat, it would appear, to be taken considerably more seriously than that reported in Microsoft’s intelligence report.
For a while now, the Indian government and its supporters have accused opposition parties and independent media outlets of taking Chinese money to spread anti-India propaganda. Prabir Purkayastha, a veteran editor and founder of NewsClick, a news website that leans left and focuses its coverage on progressive movements, has been in jail since October. He was arrested after allegations that NewsClick was funded by China. Last week, the Delhi Police filed an 8,000-page document outlining the charges against Purkayastha, even as Indian opposition leaders said the government was using the state machinery to “suppress dissent.”
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The Indian government’s treatment of Purkayastha is in keeping with its intimidation of media it considers unfriendly. Muzzling independent journalism is a crucial part of the strategy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, as they move quickly to check off items on their Hindu nationalist agenda.