This is not a list India would be proud of topping. The country is once again first in making the most demands to remove content from Facebook — 15,155 demands — a number that saw India beat 92 other countries even as Facebook recorded a 300 per cent increase in such demands in the first half of 2015. The issue may have more to do with how Indians tend to use social media platforms. Apart from asking for content to be taken down, there have also been arrests of people using web-based applications and platforms to take potshots at political leaders, morphing their images, and so on. While denigration and mischievous manipulation to spread disaffection should be condemned, there should be place for healthy criticism, and even some lampooning.
There is an increasing tendency among Indians to use the Net to settle personal scores while others have been known to run insidious campaigns that could spread hate among communities. While bans are usually counterproductive, the government has to be pro-active in keeping the Net, the widest public space in India, free of rancour and social hate. It is in the phenomenon of hate that the churning in Indian society is reflected. While the positive demographic of a young country should be useful for growth, the government has to sensitise the youth on the use of social media platforms so that the freedom of expression is used in a healthy way, rather than abused.
Our society can do without hate, the fount of most discontent in the land at present.
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