Ashwini Upadhyay, a BJP representative in Delhi, has filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court asking that the government ascertain the feasibility of linking Aadhaar with social media accounts to curb fake news, the Economic Times reported. Alternatively, the petition said, the government could take steps to deactivate bogus accounts. It claimed that there are currently 35 million Twitter accounts and 325 million Facebook accounts in the country, and that 10% of these are “fake” according to “social media experts”. How this could be implemented in anybody’s guess. For one, it raises huge privacy concerns, not to mention logistical issues. Secondly, how secure is Aadhaar data itself? Earlier this month a special investigation team (SIT) probing the IT Grids case found that the company’s hard disks had Aadhaar records of at least 9 crore people from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Punjab. Also, Twitter - unlike Facebook - allows users to set up accounts without providing their real name, so it would be wrong to treat all anonymous accounts as ‘fake’. Govt mooted Aadhaar linkage ‘to combat trolls’ In early April ET reported that the government was looking into making it mandatory for people to link their social media accounts with phone numbers or official government IDs such as Aadhaar cards and passports as a way to combat online trolls. To safeguard privacy the data would stay with the intermediary (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and law enforcement agencies would seek account details only when a crime took place or if…
