'...On Thursday, the Indian Express reported that the Facebook-owned platform said journalists and human rights activists in India have been targets of surveillance by operators using Pegasus. WhatsApp recently made details of this clear in a broader disclosure before a US federal court in San Francisco. It is still unclear the extent of this threat and how many WhatsApp profiles were compromised... Rathod is one of the lawyers handling the Bhima Koregaon case in which nine activists and lawyers have been arrested since June 2018.
'A Rashtriya Janata Dal leader was arrested on Tuesday, October 29, in Bihar for posting a video on Facebook, where he questioned Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's ban on liquor and criticised him for his wrong policies, according to the police. Opposition RJD leader Sachin Kumar Choudhary was arrested in Madhubani district after his video criticising the CM had gone viral. Choudhury, who is the vice president of the district RJD unit, was arrested from his village by Madhubani Police IT cell in charge Shailesh Kumar.
'Twitter has been accused of bowing to Indian censorship and suppressing freedom of speech in Kashmir, after nearly one million tweets were removed. Almost 100 accounts were also made inaccessible to locals in the last two years, spurring claims that Twitter is contradicting the very values it purports to uphold. The findings were revealed in a study by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Friday, showing that Twitter agreed to block more accounts in the region than in every other country combined...'
'A doctor attached to the Agartala Government Medical College & GBP Hospital has been suspended by the Tripura government for a social media comment directed at chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb. The tweets and a Facebook post furnished by the government to the doctor, Kaushik Chakraborty, also include a comment opposing the BJP’s attempt to bring the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill prior to the last general elections. Among other portfolios, the chief minister is also in charge of the health and family welfare department.
'On August 10, 2018, the Indian government informed Twitter that an account belonging to Kashmir Narrator, a magazine based in Jammu and Kashmir, was breaking Indian law. The magazine had recently published a cover story on a Kashmiri militant who fought against Indian rule. By the end of the month, Indian police had arrested the journalist who wrote it, Aasif Sultan, and Twitter had withheld the magazine’s account in India, blocking local access to more than 5,000 tweets. As of October 2019, Sultan was still in prison, facing terrorism-related charges that CPJ has repeatedly condemned.
'On Sunday evening, the hashtag #मुस्लिमो_का_संपूर्ण_बहिष्कार (‘Total Boycott of Muslims’) started trending on Twitter, with a large number of right-wing accounts tweeting it en masse. The individuals using the hashtag advocated a range of discriminatory actions against Muslims. These ranged from boycotting the buying of goods and services to advocating a ban on places of religious teaching...
'More than 100 people have been lynched to death in India over rumours of cow slaughter, cattle theft, child kidnapping and organ harvesting in the last four years. And the common factor that emereged through these cases is WhatsApp. Aqualitative study by researchers at the London School of Economics has found that “mobs of vigilantes” communicated with each other through the social media platform “to spread lies about the victims” and “used misinformation to mobilise, defend” and sometimes “to document and circulate images of the violence”.
'In what it claimed was an “exclusive story”, broadcast at around 3.30 pm on October 11, the Times Now channel claimed that Pakistani social media accounts were responsible for the hashtag #GoBackModi trending on Twitter ahead of the Prime Minister’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Chennai... Though many media reports claimed that Pakistani users were behind trending #GoBackModi in India, Twitter trends are region-specific. This means that for a topic to trend in India, users from India need to tweet on the issue.
'While addressing the party’s social media volunteers in Rajasthan’s Kota recently, Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah said that the group had the power to make any message go viral, whether real or fake...'
'Opposition JMM termed it as IAS officers' 'compromise' with the Constitution and 'betrayal' of the country... #JharkhandWithModi was also trending on Twitter for some time. Co-founder of Alt News, Mohammed Zubair tweeted on Thursday late night that at least 79 tweets were posted by Deputy Commissioners posted in Jharkhand. Some deputy commissioners like East Singhbhum DC (twitter handle @DCEastSinghbhum) posted 12 tweets. Besides them, the tweets with #JharkhandWithModi came from other deputy commissioners including DC Pakur, DC Chatra, DC Latehar and DC Koderma...
