Unmasking bloggers in India raises some interesting questions

ICTs in general 1 Minute

First it was shutting down blog sites after the Mumbai bombings in 2006. This year it was attempting to snoop into communications conducted over BlackBerry’s. Now Google has been instructed to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger in a defamation lawsuit filed by an Indian construction company against them.

The story on the Wall Street Journal reports that,

A small Indian construction-equipment company is demanding that Google Inc. disclose the name of a person who used its blogging service, in a case that could change the way the Internet giant does business in India.

The WSJ article needs a subscription to read (try BugMeNot) but another on Wired on the same issue ends on an interesting note,

This could potentially become an issue for bloggers bashing folks overseas, and set an example for cases regarding anonymity.  On the positive side, maybe it will encourage citizen journalists to back up their posts with more researched and trustworthy information.

A landmark ruling in California in 2006 gave bloggers protection from revealing their sources. In a case filed against Apple, the court ruled that

….online journalists and bloggers have the same right to protect their sources as all other journalists. The case was brought to court by Apple Computer demanding from a number of news website operators to reveal the source of confidential information posted about some of its products.

Apple did not appeal.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

Published

2 thoughts on “Unmasking bloggers in India raises some interesting questions”

  1. Interesting post, although this somehow confuses me more on something I’ve already had confusions.

    In many instances, journalists claim that they have a right to keep the sources of their information confidentially. Is this by any chance legally recognised? Wouldn’t such recognition it self be discriminatory towards the rest of the society? (No one else can do that, why should they?)

    According to wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism#Right_to_protect_confidentiality_of_sources) the legal status of this is pretty much the legal status of a normal person; at least thats how I see it, may be someone with a legal background can answer this.

  2. Pingback: Journalism of the future? Problems and challenges. « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

Comments are closed.