By Munsif Vengattil
BENGALURU (Reuters) -Draft legislation by India’s tech hub state of Karnataka that would impose jail terms of up to seven years for spreading “fake news” and other misinformation has stirred concerns among free speech activists that it could lead to censorship.
With nearly 1 billion internet users, the stakes are high in a sprawling country of many ethnic and religious communities where fake news risks stirring deadly strife and AI deepfake videos have alarmed officials during elections.
India’s federal government already regulates social media content with legislation empowering it to order takedowns of disputed content. But some states such as Karnataka have begun taking their own measures.
Karnataka’s bill, the strictest of its kind yet, stipulates that those posting “fake news” and “anti-feminist” content, or “promoting superstition”, would face imprisonment along with potential fines.
The 11-page Karnataka Mis-Information And Fake News (Prohibition) Bill does not define such offences in practice, but said special courts and a regulatory committee would be set up to implement it.
Free speech advocates have cited what they say would be the risk of selective enforcement arising from Karnataka’s measure and flagged concerns that people posting memes or making honest mistakes online could be prosecuted.
“Misinformation is fairly subjective and every person who uses the internet is susceptible to falling within the dragnet of this law,” said Apar Gupta, founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a New Delhi-based digital advocacy group which first made the Karnataka draft legislation public.
The state government of Karnataka, home to the city of Bengaluru that hosts the offices or branches of many Indian and foreign tech giants, has said the bill will be released for public consultation before implementation.
Priyank Kharge, Karnataka’s IT minister, said on Friday “there is a lot of misinformation on the proposed Misinformation Bill in public”. He later added that the “sole objective is to address the growing digital information disorder” and the government’s focus was to tackle misinformation and fake news, “and nothing beyond that”.
He did not immediately respond to Reuters calls seeking further comment on Monday.
Karnataka’s move could risk creating multiple regulations imposing conflicting obligations and regulatory challenges for companies, said Aman Taneja, partner at law and policy firm Ikigai.
Some Indian media have sharply criticised the draft bill.
The Deccan Herald newspaper on Monday titled an opinion piece “A remedy that’s worse than the menace”, saying the Karnataka government should “do away with the criminal provisions” in the legislation.
India has over the years held talks with U.S. tech giants like Google it sees as having been slow to remove fake news posts, and New Delhi in 2019 set up a “Fact Check Unit” to debunk what it sees as misinformation.
(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Kalra and Mark Heinrich)
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