Meanwhile: in 🇮🇳 India
India's Election Commission said on Monday a record-breaking 642 million voters cast their ballots in the general election that concluded on June 1 and dismissed opposition concerns over how the votes would be counted.
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/elections/
A Modi Win Will Only Mean More Trouble for Indian Muslims - How India’s Hindu Nationalists Are Weaponizing History Against Muslims
https://time.com/6984269/modi-election-indian-muslims-essay/
ICYMI
Exclusive: YouTube Approved Ads Promoting Disinformation on India’s Election
https://time.com/6962684/india-election-2024-opposition-party/
vids that were making claims saying Modi had stopped the Ukraine war with Russia and loadsa, shit loads, of other claims
And > How bulldozers became a vehicle of injustice in India - they have become a weapon in the hands of India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to destroy homes and livelihoods of the minority Muslim community.
key piece of the BJP’s agenda involves twisting history to demonize Muslims, and Hindu nationalists often zero-in on the Mughals, a dynasty that ruled parts of northern and central India during its heyday from about 1560 to 1720
https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/short-history-of-the-mughal-empire-9789389812817/
Hindu nationalists falsely accuse the Mughals of committing a genocide. Other times they falsely malign the Mughals as colonialists, which depicts them—and by extension all Muslims today—as a foreign threat to India
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/25785648.2022.2153974
Hindu nationalists have in turn attacked the Taj Mahal as a Mughal-built monument, omitting it from tourist booklets and promoting the conspiracy theory that it used to be a Shiva Temple
In 2021, a Hindu nationalist leader urged his followers to be prepared to kill millions of Indian Muslims.
They have removed parts of Mughal history from school textbooks. This renders many Indian children ignorant of key parts of their own history
https://time.com/6269349/india-textbook-changes-controversy-hindu-nationalism/
After having students hit their 7-year-old Muslim classmate, an Indian teacher stated defiantly: “I do not regret my act; people are with me.” Indeed, over the past decade, Indian Muslims have been subjected to violent and often deadly assaults by India’s Hindu majority
Modi's control over media outlets is one way to stop critics saying anything, threats of jail, investigations of opposition even saw some join his party which meant the threats and investigations stopped
The Recent Elections Demonstrate India’s Growing Democratic Deficit - Premier Modi’s control of the media, vast campaign funds and open demagoguery have left him free to ignore voters’ real concerns
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/the-recent-elections-demonstrate-indias-growing-democratic-deficit/
Its no wonder he is gonna/has win/won
More than half of Indians are reportedly active internet users, a figure set to reach 900 million by 2025
Minister Chandrasekhar said India had “woken up earlier” to the danger posed by deepfakes than other countries because of the size of its online population.
He also warned that social media companies will be held accountable for any AI-generated “deepfakes'' posted on their platforms in compliance with “very clear and explicit rules.”
Ironically, political parties themselves have been using deepfakes and AI in aggressive pre-election campaigning, ranging from multi-lingual public addresses and personalised video messages to creating lifelike videos of deceased leaders
Prateek Waghre, who heads the Internet Freedom Foundation in India, believes the question of whether AI or deepfakes should be treated as a separate category is secondary to the core issue: a lack of long-term measures to address the broad family of problems around non-consensual imagery
At last count, India had a staggering 400 million WhatsApp users, the largest user base in the world.
With these kinds of messaging apps it’s hard to find context on the kind of content media users consume in a space where formats like audio and video can easily be shared. A contentious political environment adds to these challenges and makes them more difficult to address.
The other critical concern is the ability of AI to claim that reality is faked, as well as to fake reality -
Fact-checking institutions like WITNESS are already seeing many examples of specific incidents where people try to play the reverse card – use the existence of AI to dismiss real footage.
https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_gregory_when_ai_can_fake_reality_who_can_you_trust
Hard cases make bad law:
Sharp political and religious overtones, manipulation of reality and an erosion of confidence amongst users are all valid concerns. But the biggest risk for India could come from damaging laws, rather than dangerous tech
On the law, and the frequent amendments to them, the Editors Guild of India wrote in 2023:
“At the outset, determination of fake news cannot be in the sole hands of the government and will result in the censorship of the press"
"This new procedure basically serves to make it easier to muzzle the free press, and will give sweeping powers to the PIB (Press Information Bureau), or any ‘other agency authorised by the central government for fact-checking’ to force online intermediaries to take down content that the government may find problematic.”
https://editorsguild.in/statements-issued/
End Thread
Jon Oliver has a few things to say about India and the election
@ecksmc Thank you for this detailed discussion of the political train wreck that is happening in India and with Modi in charge. Smh. Scary and dangerous times ahead.
@ACG2 too much politics to be had this year 😆 it ain't looking good either for many people
In April 2023, the Indian government promulgated certain amendments to the existing Information Technology rules. Through these amendments, tech platforms were now obligated to inform and restrict users to not “host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share any information” which is “identified as fake or false or misleading by [a] fact-check unit of the Central Government” in respect of “any business of” the Indian government.
(PDF URL)
https://www.meity.gov.in/writereaddata/files/244980-Gazette%20Notification%20for%20IT%20Amendment%20Rules%2C%202023-%20relating%20to%20online%20gaming%20%26%20false%20information%20about%20Govt.%20business.pdf