New York Times (April 26, 2012)
April 26, 2012, 6:30 AM
Social Media 1, Indian Government 0
By HEATHER TIMMONS
A screenshot of the YouTube page displaying several video clips that
show up with the search terms “Abhishek Manu Singhvi sex CD.”
The futility of the Indian government’s attempts to control what is
posted on Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites was thrown
into high relief this week, after a video purportedly showing Congress
spokesman Abhishek Manu Singvi having sex in his office resulted in his
resignation.
India/Reuters
Abhishek Manu Singhvi at his residence in New Delhi, in this September
2, 2011 file photo.
Mr. Singhvi, who also is a prominent lawyer, said the video was a fake,
but resigned from his spokesman spot and from a parliamentary law
committee he headed Monday evening, to “prevent even the slightest
possible parliamentary disruption,” he said in a statement.
The video, which has now been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people
on YouTube and other social media sites, is neither explicit, nor
immediately incriminating – most of it appears to show little more than
the top of Mr. Singhvi’s balding head, in profile, bobbing above the
top of his desk. He might be waxing his office floor, or searching
somewhat frantically for a dropped contact lens.
Still, a Delhi High Court injunction on April 13 banned television
stations from broadcasting the video, which was originally distributed
to media outlets on a CD. Perhaps frustrated by their inability to show
the footage in question, India’s television news stations have been
engaged in unusually highbrow debate about whether India actually needs
stricter privacy laws for public figures.
There’s no such talk on social media sites, though.
The video was quickly posted on Facebook, Pirate’s Bay and other social
media and video-sharing sites. While a Facebook page especially created
for it has been taken down, there are now dozens of versions of the
video on YouTube, in increasingly pixelated versions as users copy and
post it again and again. (One YouTube user even helpfully posted a
video of the Facebook page, and filmed the process of opening all the
links on the page.)
Social media companies received requests from Indian law enforcement
officials and court orders asking them to remove the video, which they
did, executives in social media companies said on background. But it
kept popping up again and again.
Tejinder Pal Singh Bagga of the Delhi-based Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena, a
right-wing group, told wire service IANS that he posted the video on
Twitvid, which allows users to distribute videos via Twitter. “I am not
afraid of these people and they deserve this,” he said. “I am prepared
for any consequences,” he said.
Facebook officials said they couldn’t comment on the situation. The
page in question that featured the Singhvi video was created with by a
“fake” user, which is against Facebook’s rules.
Google received a copy of a generic court order from Mr. Singhvi’s
lawyers on April 24 asking it to remove the video, which it followed.
“Our policy prohibits inappropriate content, on YouTube and our
community effectively polices the site for inappropriate material,” the
company said in an e-mailed statement. Inappropriate material includes
videos that “contain pornography, harassment, content that violates
privacy, illegal acts or explicit violence violate the YouTube
community guidelines,” it said. Users can flag content they feel is
inappropriate, she said, and then the company’s staff reviews the
content and removes it if it violates guidelines. “In addition, Google
acts to promptly remove an offending video if a court order requires
it,” the statement said.
But since Google has taken down the first offensive videos and copies
of videos, others have sprung up. Per Google’s general policy, these
will only be removed if YouTube users or others complain about them.
On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court dismissed a petition by the Bar
Council of Delhi (of which Mr. Singhvi is a member) seeking to take
action against Mr. Singhvi’s driver, who had allegedly originally
distributed the CD.
Investigating who first introduced the video to social media sites and
circulated it there is next to impossible, Internet experts say.
“No country, even though its law might say so, is able to exercise
jurisdiction across the world” on the Internet, said Sunil Abraham, the
executive director of Bangalore’s Center for Internet and Society, a
research and advocacy group. Because India does not have a bilateral
cyber-crime agreement with the United States (as the European Union
does), getting American companies like Facebook and Google to take down
or investigate the source of content that offends Indian government
officials can be a slow and cumbersome process, he said.
The Indian government may never be able to track down who first posted
the video, Mr. Abraham said. “Drawing a chain of causality and trying
to arrive at the first person who introduced it onto the Internet is a
bit of a complicated task,” he said. “Even if you find one version of
the story, there might be another one,” he said. In addition, the
Indian government might only be able to access records from Indian
telecommunications providers, he said, and related to Indian ISP
addresses.
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