Chinmayi Sripada's campaign to ban twitter accounts that make rape threats
Abhijith B
Public
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Chinmayi Sripada, a famous singer is leading an online campaign demanding twitter accounts of those who make rape threats be banned.
Should we favor this or not?
Pirate Praveen Fri 24 Mar 2017 8:04AM
I don't feel we should be joining it. Centralized communication service like twitter itself is a problem. The problem of censorship is already bad and giving private companies more power to censor is only going to make the problem even worse.
Akhilesh Jamdar Fri 24 Mar 2017 8:16AM
When fundamental rights were established, slavery was made illegal. Unfortunately software slavery(nonfree) was invented post constitution and was never interpreted as slavery. While software as a service is perfectly fine, building walls and divisions just to make profits at the cost of liberty is not.
I would support a petition to ban twitter, but not speech. If the rape threat is genuine then you can file complaint under 506 of the IPC and maybe the unfortunate section 67 of the IT act.
Kannan V M · Wed 22 Mar 2017 7:57PM
This highlights two issues, which at first look, may seem to conflict each other. One talks about what we find "alright" and "not alright"(of what we hear) and second one talks about media censorship.
1) If someone spam, and continue to spam, that user and their posts/spam comments/contents must be removed.
2) But if the power to remove users/posts/comments goes to a single person/entity, it can be bad.
*Centralised power structure is unreliable, if some user is banned or some posts are removed from a service because it is profitable for the service owners, then someone's freedom to express is denied because of someone else's vested interests.
*At this point we can have two solutions,
+the decisions should be done in a democratic way, even if removal of a user or a specific kind of post, the authority should not be one person/entity's decision, it should be under discussion and vote(i am not suggesting a majoritarian one, majority need not be right, but its another discussion).
+one could choose between services when one is banned or one think the information provided by a service is censored.
3) The basic issue is neither of these, our attitude/viewpoint towards oposite sex, i dont think surveiling/censoring twitter posts can solve this issue, it merely tries to hide it.