The Government of India is putting the finishing touches on a social media policy, which will monitor anti-national propaganda and attempt to arrest the spread of malicious rumors, reports PTI. Apparently, the government already has a set of dos and don'ts which it now wants to turn into formal guidelines. However, it's not clear if the government has included social media platforms in the process, and also what exactly does social media encompass. We mention this because an earlier Ministry of Communications and Information Technology approved a framework and guidelines for use of social media for government organizations and defined social media to include social networking platforms like Facebook, microblogging platforms like Twitter, blogs maintained by individuals, video blogs and video sharing platforms like YouTube, and Wikipedia. And in July 2016, while informing civil servants and officers that they were strictly not allowed to criticize the government on social media, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp were named. However, what's even more important is a clear definition of what the government considers anti-India or anti-national, because the implementation of the policy will depend on it. The term anti-national has been debated and dissected at length over the past few months, so we will not go deeper into it at this point. The report also mentioned that the government is still in the process of finalizing the infrastructure requirements for implementing the policy, especially the manpower and technical requirements. It's worth noting that back in 2015, barely three weeks after the Supreme Court…
