The question of regulating online news — as the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, under Smriti Irani has formed a committee to do — isn’t just a regulatory question; it’s an existential one. “When we ask what is news, do we mean in terms of regulation, or do we mean in terms of life,” asked Abhinandan Sekhri of Newslaundry. Since the beginning of the internet, the barriers between information and its consumers have slowly withered away as traditional news organisations and their editors have lost their gatekeeping monopoly. Anyone can start a blog and subvert business models of news publishing giants considerably larger than they are. While this huge shift has been hugely democratizing all over the world, it has also given an unprecedented platform to fake news, disinformation, and hate speech. Since the conversation on fake news only started in the aftermath of the 2016 US election, this is a very young debate, with no solid legislative or regulatory consequences in the US or in most developed countries. In April, Malaysia's government passed a law criminalizing fake news, and the downside to that has been that two opposition leaders have already been targeted by it in less than two months. So the question arises: should we regulate online news content at all, and if so, how? This discussion was held at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, with support from STAR India, Amazon and Google. What is journalism and news? It's a simple question, but approaching it with regulatory…
