[_vertigo]

One would hope. But that is not what is going to happen. People do not talk over small networks because they are inconvenient due to their small size. It is more convenient to talk over large networks because there are more people to talk to.

If you ban a massive centralized network, another one will take its place. It will certainly be smaller than Facebook, but no less centralized. And in this particular case, I would imagine that based on the Indian government's grievances with these American networks, information will almost certainly be less free on the replacement.

[chrisco255]

On the contrary, nearly all of the most impactful conversations you've ever had have have been in small groups or one on one.

[ysavir]

GP isn't suggesting otherwise. They're saying that people trend towards larger networks, regardless of the quality of those networks or their impacts. Facebook and Co can be banned tomorrow, but the next phase will see a surge of small players getting bigger and bigger until one of them reaches a Facebook and Co. For India status, landing the people of India where they started. Except that the new incumbent will be more easily pressured or controlled by India's government.

[veilrap]

But that doesn't prevent said conversations from happening on a large social network.

Email, Facebook, SMS, Twitter, and Discord are all massive networks that all can also facilitate small group conversations.

[throwaway8581]

But maybe it will be run by Indian people, who will enforce Indian values, and who are accountable to their Indian families and Indian peers and Indian law.

[ivalm]

In India Modi's government has a long history of subverting media and trying to use government powers to control narrative. I don't think totalitarianism (even though backed by the government) is a good option.

[random314]

In India, this would mean enforcement of recently invented Indian values such as fascism, communalism, anti miscegenation laws, segregation laws, denaturalization, casteism, arrest and murder of journalists, and faking or withholding of numbers of national importance such as covid19 deaths, farmer suicide stats, gdp numbers and other economic indicators. These topics are not accountable to a certain minority of Indian families of privileged upbringing.

[notahacker]

It will certainly be run by people who will accede to the Indian government's requests to remove anything the Indian government does not like. Ironically you started off upthread complaining about removal of 'true, important information about the pandemic'. You'll never guess what the subject of most of the Indian government's removal requests have been lately...

[throwaway8581]

So the question is who decides. Do you let rich coastal Americans determine what you're allowed to talk about or do you let local powers make those decisions? Indians aren't very fond of foreign rule, and no control is more potent than control over information and ideas.

[remarkEon]

>Indians aren't very fond of foreign rule, and no control is more potent than control over information and ideas.

One of the elements missing in the intra-US debate is that a lot of the hostility that much of the country feels toward Silicon Valley is generated from a very similar feeling. To many, how culturally distant elites on the coasts are from those in "middle America" coupled with how much power the former has over the later ... it can, at times, make it feel like there's an element of foreign rule. Technology has made it a lot easier to project cultural power - once you have it. Once you lose it, it seems it's almost impossible to get it back.

[notahacker]

No, the question is whether Indians are free to choose to read things which are inconvenient to the Indian government [but not at all irksome to rich coastal Americans], or whether the Indian government gets to determine which information and ideas are allowed to be disseminated online in India. Facebook and Twitter seek only to control their own, separate platforms.

(Plus of course what will actually happen is that Facebook and Twitter will comply, and Indian users of those platforms will be subject to both the whims of California-based moderators and the Indian government's current penchant for objecting to pictures of funerals and suggestions they might not be doing a wonderful job. The potency of control of information and ideas in action; nobody in the upper echelons of the Indian government cares about Zuckerberg's policy on the lab-leak theory...)

[throwaway8581]

You're indulging in a huge fiction: that people freely choose what to read and what to believe. Your beliefs are a product of your environment, and your environment was traditionally mostly your family and broader community and country, but today your environment includes massive online oligopolies that have extreme power due to network effects.

If your country is consuming information through the filter of the American coastal elite, then they are likely to come to believe in the things that the American elite believes, to despise the things that the American elite despises. We can meaningfully speak of individuals having a choice to believe this or that, but as a society, that kind of domination of information will predictably drive people to believe what they are told to believe.

[notahacker]

None of which changes the fact that what is actually happening is that the Indian government is the one seeking to dominate information to drive Indians to believe what they are told to believe.

It cares not in the slightest whether Indians get access to things Facebook cares to censor (which they can anyway, through the large majority of Indian media Facebook does not influence or seek to influence) but is determined to browbeat Facebook into removing evidence that the Indian government's handling of COVID might be suboptimal. This is the purpose of the policy. Reinstating posts on lab leak theories is not the purpose of the policy, and the American coastal elite (or Bangalore tech elite) will continue to censor stuff they want to on their platforms in addition to the more pervasive and more universal Indian-government censorship.

Takes a remarkable degree of dishonesty to make freedom of thought arguments in favour of the Indian government being able to prevent any material it does not agree with from reaching Indian eyeballs.

[jdauriemma]

If it's a for-profit enterprise, it will be run by people whose primary loyalty is to shareholders and their own pocketbooks.