Ayodhya Trending on Twitter Sparks Censorship Concerns

Ayodhya Trending on Twitter Sparks Censorship Concerns is a Mint news report by Surabhi Agarwal published on 7 December 2012. The piece covers the trending of the #ShauryaDiwas, #Ayodhya and #BabriMasjid hashtags on Twitter on the 20th anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, and the broader debate over content regulation that followed the August 2012 north-east exodus crisis. Sunil Abraham is quoted observing that fringe groups tend to take extreme positions to attract attention.

Article Details
Full Text
Context and Background
External Link

Article Details

📰 Published in:: Mint
📅 Date:: 7 December 2012
👤 Author:: Surabhi Agarwal
📄 Type:: News Report
📰 Newspaper Link:: Read Online

Full Text

New Delhi: On the 20th anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, the ShauryaDiwas, Ayodhya and Babri Masjid hashtags were trending on Twitter all day, with almost 2,500 messages sent over 48 hours.

The tag ShauryaDiwas was used by supporters of the demolition and was used in half the total number of tweets.

Experts said the public display of extreme views on a social networking platform has the potential to create social unrest, leaving the government with few options but to regulate content, in turn fuelling the Internet censorship debate further.

A senior government official said that in a situation in which there are serious national security implications, the government has no option but to "block content" in order to stop communal sentiment from flaring up.

According to social web analytics firm Social Hues, the tweets reached an audience of 456,000 followers. However, according to Vinita Ananth, chief executive of Social Hues, there were also messages that "condemned the call for ShauryaDiwas" tagging it ShameDiwas. "New platforms like Twitter are providing real-time feedback on public sentiment, which is unprecedented."

Ashis Nandy, political and social analyst, said that even though very few Indians are on platforms such as Twitter, communications over them give a hint of what a certain section of the society is thinking about.

"It is a small representation of the middle class, which is driven by ideology and some of the people with extreme opinions may also belong to this group, so perhaps it could have some security implications," he said.

Fringe groups such as those above tend to take extreme positions to get attention, said Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based research organization, the Centre for Internet and Society.

Having learnt their lessons after the recent Assam-related panic, intelligence agencies are now keeping a close watch on the Internet, another government official said.

"If necessary, posts will be removed through legitimate ways," the official said, adding that a debate was underway about how to strike a balance between freedom of speech and the lawful requirement of agencies. "Mischief by a few people creates nuisance in society. The government is now looking for ways through which it can regionally block or remove inflammatory tweets. We don't want to curb freedom of speech and the government doesn't have any such intentions either," the official said.

Hate messages on social media had sparked a panic exodus of people from the north-east from cities such as Bangalore, Pune and Chennai in August.

Context and Background

This article was published on 7 December 2012, the 20th anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya on 6 December 1992. The anniversary fell at a moment when the Indian government was already in a heightened state of sensitivity about social media and communal content, having endured the north-east exodus crisis of August 2012 — in which rumours and doctored images circulating on platforms including Facebook and WhatsApp had triggered a mass departure of north-eastern migrant workers from Bangalore, Pune and Chennai. The government’s response to that crisis had been widely criticised as both technically inept and legally overreaching, and the inter-ministerial discussions about Internet governance and content regulation that followed were still ongoing when this article was written.

The #ShauryaDiwas hashtag (“Day of Valour”) was used by supporters of the demolition, while #ShameDiwas appeared as a counter-tag on the same platform. Social Hues reported that approximately 2,500 tweets reached 456,000 followers over 48 hours. Although the volume was limited in absolute terms, the episode was treated as a test case for how social media discourse could intersect with communal sensitivities and public order concerns.

Sunil Abraham is cited in the article as observing that fringe groups use extreme positions to attract attention. This is a descriptive analytical point rather than a policy prescription, and it sits in deliberate contrast to the unnamed government official’s instinct to block content. The underlying tension the article captures is structural: the same platform features that made Twitter useful for tracking and understanding public sentiment in real time also made it an amplifier for inflammatory content, and the government’s available legal tools — bulk blocking, takedown requests and regional filtering — were still being debated in terms of their scope and proportionality.