Indian Government Gives Itself the Power to ‘Fact-Check’ and Delete Social Media Posts ⇥ restofworld.org

Adnan Bhat, Rest of World:

The Indian government on April 6 announced a state-run fact-checking unit that will have sweeping powers to label any piece of information related to the government as “fake, false or misleading” and have it removed from social media. The country has tweaked its tech rules that now require platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to take down content flagged by the fact-checking body. Internet service providers are also expected to block URLs to such content. Failure to comply could result in the platforms losing safe harbor protection that safeguards them from legal action against any content posted by their users, said India’s minister of information technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

Given Twitter’s new censorship-happy leadership, this effectively amounts to a worldwide policy.