Need for certain rules of engagement for new media: Tewari

Observing that anonymity provided by social media to users was prone to misuse, Information & Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari today said certain rules needed to be laid down for the new media while ensuring that the freedom to express was not unreasonably restricted.
"There are a lot of people who don't differentiate between privacy and anonymity. And they abuse the anonymity which is provided by these content agnostic platforms in order to run every kind of hate campaign which we have seen can have a very detrimental effect," he said.
"I have always believed that insofar as the new media is concerned, there need to be certain rules of engagement, which are all pervasive and for which you require an inter- governmental covenant."

He said that currently someone sitting in Hong Kong, Macau or Bahamas could post India-specific content and the Indian government would not have any control but the effects and reactions of such actions would still be felt.
"So in the coming time as the media proliferates more, there will be need for inter governmental covenants and along with this it will have to be ensured that an individual's freedom to express is not placed under unreasonable restriction," Tewari said.
The minister, who was addressing a discussion organised by Udayan Sharma Foundation Trust, said that the information that major news media organisations made public went through a rigorous editorial control, a process which is absent in the case of social media.