Bottom-up imaginaries: examining discursive construction of social media roles and affordances in India

ABSTRACT

In this article, I analyze discourses around the introduction of Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Code – new changes in laws regulating new media companies in India, and how these discourses inform the imaginations about the rights and duties of corporations and citizens in the country. I argue that though these guidelines were brought into effect through legal and juridical channels, they were reified through state-led and user-generated political discourse, constituting bottom-up imaginaries about the governance of social media platforms. To comprehensively analyze the impact of the guidelines regulating social media companies, this article argues for the need to examine the interlinkages between online discourse and policy regulations at three levels of operation: (a) the government’s imagination for the country’s digital future, (b) quotidian online discourse reifying the politics of regulation and (c) the dominant imagination of social media as socio-political actors responsible for upholding democracy, the freedom of speech of users, and dissent. Based on the findings and analysis, I argue that the regulation of social media platforms in India demonstrates reconfiguring relationships between social media companies, emerging forms of nationalism, and the government’s expectations of compliance from social media companies.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• corporations
• government
• bottom-up imaginaries
• nationalism
• data extractivism
• Twitter
• Koo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more details read ‘The Gazette of India’ available at https://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2021/225464.pdf.

2 For more details read Barrett and Kaye (2021).

3 For more information, read Twitter’s Synthetic and Manipulated Media policy, available at https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/manipulated-media.

4 Watch the following videos of the news coverage of Koo: (1) https://youtu.be/NyOpAgEH2Nk; (2) https://youtu.be/9GAAqru0neU; (3) https://youtu.be/gvAwrTUhwLU; (4) https://youtu.be/9YAcxyXvxyE

5 The detailed programme document is available at www.cybercrime.gov.in.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kiran Vinod Bhatia

Kiran Vinod Bhatia is a digital anthropologist who works at the intersection of user experience and digital media. Her research examines the role of users, states, and corporations in enabling and sustaining diverse digital cultures and practices in Global South countries. Bhatia also studies the interlinkages between digital technologies, protest cultures, and social movements. Currently, she consults with a Sudanese nonprofit organisation as the Program Director for a project designed to examine the phenomenon of disinformation in Africa. She is also a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development, Management and Communication at MICA, India.