Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court
82 comments
·October 25, 2024lolinder
On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet".
Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.
Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...
typewithrhythm
As more normies got on the web more of it becomes about how to herd them.
In the early days there was less gain from authoritarian actions, because you are more likely to be resisted by the users of any service.
The current users don't know how to bypass restrictions, and are generally more numerous. Making authoritarian actions more valuable.
Unfortunately this leads to previously useful sites declining.
ggm
Dividing the world into normies and others is a very odd way to characterise widespread adoption of anything. I hesitate to use the neckbeard word, but it's got overtones.
There are as many usefully curated sites, as sites where state actors curate content to hide the reptile led barcode truth from the normies.
llm_trw
The solution is to move to the dark web and make your site unpalatable to normies.
The posison slug strategy.
ants_everywhere
I mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others.
And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B.
So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions.
And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale.
You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.
endgame
> Have governments become more authoritarian?
Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like.
An Australian example: https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1834455727764869593#m
LudwigNagasena
> Have governments become more authoritarian?
It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation".
> Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.
fireflash38
Do you think that there's a link between an extreme proliferation of misinformation and people wanting to control it?
zmgsabst
No.
Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance.
Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.
ekianjo
> have governments become more authoritarian
People themselves have become more authoritarian. COVID-19 rings a bell.
rootusrootus
I don't know that COVID is a great example. The people most upset about 'authoritarian' abuses by gov't during COVID are themselves extremely authoritarian. Just about different topics.
I otherwise agree that authoritarianism is on the rise, across the board.
fwipsy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International covers the lawsuit as well.
"In July 2024, ANI filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court — claiming to have been defamed in its article on Wikipedia — and sought ₹2 crore (US$240,000) in damages.[16][17][18] On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance. The judge on the case stated "If you don't like India, please don't work in India... We will ask government to block your site".[19][20] In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources.[21] Justice Manmohan said "I think nothing can be worse for a news agency than to be called a puppet of an intelligence agency, stooge of the government. If that is true, the credibility goes."[22]"
I suppose that this might not be the most objective article on Wikipedia. I don't have context for these statements. The way that Wikipedia quotes the judge makes it sound like he's threatening to order the Indian government to block Wikipedia because Wikipedia says that ANI is government propaganda. Is that really what's going on? If so it seems extremely ironic, to the point of tacitly admitting ANI's links to the Indian government. I know hacker news has many Indian readers; can they provide some context or an alternative perspective?
praveen9920
No. You read the statements right. Indian judges tend to give such statements, sometimes even worse. For example, recently one judge in unrelated case gave a statement that “criminalising marital rape is bit harsh”.
The main problem in this case is that Wikimedia hasn’t complied YET with high court orders of revealing people who did the edits. ANI just went ahead and filed contempt of court case before Wiki legal team could respond. I’m not sure if initial order came with some sort of deadline or not. I guess they are trying to leverage the delay in their favour.
In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods.
tomrod
Sounds like an authoritarian government that should be ignored.
contravariant
That's an actual quote? That's so, juvenile. And it admits pretty much all of the 'defamation' that Wikipedia is being sued for.
Also a bit stupid to ask someone to not work in India if they point out they have no legal presence there. If they really have no presence in India it might make most sense to just call their bluff. The government does indeed have the power to block the webpage but there's no winning against a government that is willing to go that far. One can only hope that blocking wikipedia is unpopular enough to give the government pause.
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Liftyee
Time to sit back and wait for the Streisand effect [0] to kick in... When will they learn that trying to hide things from the Internet is never that simple (as evidenced by the already-posted archive links)?
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tomrod
Indeed. I never would have heard or cared about this statement or the high court. Now, I'll let the rage driven by an unwarranted attack against a purely beneficial institution cool a bit from white hot before engaging.
alwayslikethis
I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this. Maybe we need a write-only global database and somehow separate the hosting/publisher from the organization that certifies it. Imagine if they simply sign an archive which is distributed over IPFS or some other distributed system. It would become impossible to take down content and as such impossible to comply with any blocking orders. They can issue a revocation but users are no obligated to respect that.
driverdan
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
You withdraw all operations from within that country and you don't comply.
josephg
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
alwayslikethis
[delayed]
1shooner
>Good, trustworthy governance.
This example shows that you can't just shut off free speech to a few rogue nations, because states 'incompatible with liberal democracy' include the majority of the world's population. As we see, they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
What hypothetical 'trustworthy governance' would be less susceptible to India's influence than WMF is in this case?
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ta988
Pretty similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-sur-Haute_military_ra...
PeterCorless
Thank you. We're seeing a far more insidious and accelerating nationalization and politicization of reality. A very dangerous world ahead.
userbinator
We're seeing the effects of globalisation.
India has no right to control what the rest of the world sees.
lnxg33k1
[flagged]
tomrod
Recommend reviewing some the other comments with sources listed in this thread. Basically, they preemptively levied contempt charges before there was a chance to respond, and the statements were sourced.
Schiendelman
It looks like it was well sourced. What are you seeing?
iafisher
On-wiki discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#T...
josephcsible
Does the WMF have any presence in India? Why don't they just ignore the ruling?
ImJamal
All of Wikipedia would likely be banned which, I assume, they want to avoid.
XenophileJKO
If I were Wikipedia, I would just shut off access for a week or two.
tomrod
Yet another need for alternative, private internet connections. Authoritarianism should be acutely subverted.
OutOfHere
The only way in which this could be possible, if not via VPNs, is via everyone have direct satellite internet, which is a bit difficult without good line of sight. It would also require an independent means of payment like layer II of bitcoin.
The better answer would be one where the ISPs don't have any ability to block websites. Web3 technologies could make it possible.
jprete
This article might be more informative although I can't say how accurate it is: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/wikipedia-suspends-ac...
mrlongroots
Some context that is essentially personal opinion, take it for what it's worth:
It's not that ANI is an absolutely non-partisan and an objective outlet. They do lean pro-government, but the yardstick being applied here is not consistent at all. No Indian news outlet is great by that yardstick, but one is being called an absolute sham, and those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote.
Now you could argue that Wikipedia is volunteer-driven, and you could submit an edit, but it is hard. During the farmers' protests ~3 years ago, articles were worded in a manner that led one to believe that deaths by natural causes among the protestors were somehow caused by the protests. I just checked the article as I was writing this response, and there is still a detailed section titled "fatalities" that mostly documents deaths from natural causes. I tried sending in edits for some of this back in the day but faced an uphill battle against other contributors and gave up because I had a day job to get to.
None of this justifies a page being blocked, especially outside Indian jurisdiction, but it would be unwise to ignore the broader context about the website being an ideological battleground and not being able to pull off the right balance.
boomboomsubban
How can they claim defamation when the original sentence said "(ANI has) been accused of...?" The bar of truth for that statement is absurdly low.
numbers
From the removed article:
At the time of the suit's filing, the Wikipedia article about ANI said the news agency had "been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions". The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill".
The filing argued that Wikipedia "is a platform used as public utility and as such cannot behave as a private sector". It also complained that Wikipedia had "closed" the article about ANI for editing except by Wikipedia's "own editors", citing this as evidence of defamation with malicious intent and evidence that WMF was using its "officials" to "actively participate" in controlling content. ANI asked for ₹2 crore (approximately US$240,000) in damages and an injunction against Wikipedia "making, publishing, or circulating allegedly false, misleading, and defamatory content against ANI".
The case was filed in July 2024 before Justice Navin Chawla in the Delhi High Court as ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v Wikimedia Foundation Inc & Ors. ANI argued that Wikipedia is a significant social media "intermediary" within the definition of Information Technology Act, 2000, and must therefore comply with the requirements of the Act, including taking down any content that the government or its agencies deem violative, or be personally liable for content published under its platform. Chawla issued a summons to WMF, called the lawsuit "a pure case of defamation" and set a hearing date of 20 August. On 20 August 2024, Chawla ordered WMF to disclose identifying details of three editors (also defendants in the lawsuit) who had worked on the Wikipedia article about ANI to allow ANI to pursue legal action against them as individuals. Chawla ordered WMF to provide the information within two weeks.
On 5 September, ANI asked the court to find WMF in contempt when the identifying details were not released within the time frame. Chawla issued a contempt of court order and threatened to order the government of India to block Wikipedia in the country, saying "We will not take it any more. If you don't like India, please don't work in India...We will close your business transactions here." In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources. Chawla ordered that an "authorised representative" of WMF appear in person at the next hearing, which was scheduled for 25 October 2024.
On 14 October, Delhi High Court justices Manmohan and Tushar Rao Gedela objected to the creation of an English Wikipedia article about the defamation case, saying the article "disclos[ed] something about a sub-judice matter" and "will have to be taken down", and scheduled review for 16 October. On 16 October, the court stated that "Accordingly, in the interim, this Court directs that the pages on Wikipedia pertaining to the single judge as well as discussion of the observations of division bench be taken down or deleted within 36 hours".
http://archive.today/XIxZv