Earlier this week, the Indian Union Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal asked Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo to pre-screen derogatory, defamatory and inflammatory content about political leaders and religion. Mr. Sibal suggested that the content uploaded by over 100 million Internet users in India be pre-screened and stopped from going live if found objectionable. And by ‘screening’ the minister meant manual screening and not screening by technology. First it was bad enough that the government should even try to control people’s voices on the Internet, then to suggest that content uploaded every second by over 100 million users could be screened by humans and not technology – Mr Sibal should have known that he was going to face a huge backlash over his move. Indian Union Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal. Image from Flickr by World Economic Forum (CC BY-SA). The mob needed a slogan to run with and political blog Kafila gave them exactly that. Blogger Shivam Vij on Kafila urged people to raise the slogan “Kapil Sibal is an Idiot”: I urge you to write KAPIL SIBAL IS AN IDIOT as your Facebook status message, use the hashtag #IdiotKapilSibal on Twitter, and write a blog post with the above title, because there may soon be a day when he may prevent you from doing so. What followed was a wave of insult, ridicule and sarcasm thrown at Mr Sibal by hundreds and thousands of Internet users in India, including celebrity politicians, film personalities, popular bloggers, authors and millions of ordinary users. Initially Indian social media users on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus were angry at the government’s attempt to control their freedom of expression but they soon channelized that anger into humour and sarcasm. Meme's like this was created. Within a day, a Facebook page with that slogan got over 400 likes. Hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets have been floated. Creative social media users have gone a step ahead and created many humorous images, videos and jokes. The Delhi Technological University’s students community blog Indian Fusion wrote that its technically impossible to pre-screen every content and moreover we don’t need regulations: The point is that you don’t need to police the Indian Youth. Self-policing or self-regulation is already working well. For eg on facebook, when someone posts a abusive content related to some god, then people immediately starts reporting it as abuse and if facebook finds it offensive it removes it as soon as possible. So this self-regulation is already existing which is enough. A right to ‘self regulation’ and the freedom to chose our own definition of ‘objectionable content’ and then decide when and how to respond to what we think is objectionable, whether to complaint or ignore – has been a common opinion amongst all the reactions that have come from various net users. Harsht writes: As ordinary users, what do we do when we find something objectionable on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere on the Internet! We report it to the platform provider. Most popular platform providers have such mechanisms. Indian Liberals blogged: People have all the freedom to feel offended but they don’t have the right to regulate others from saying what they want to say. Their freedom to get offended ends where others’ freedom of expression begins. Period. Another common reaction is to compare this incident to the level of freedom of speech and expressions or the lack of it in our neighbouring countries like Pakistan and China. People are angry and ashamed that an Indian politician attempted to tarnish the image of the democratic India that the youth is presumably so proud of. Blogger Vidyut wrote on AamJanata: Politicians have no shame, they say, but people do. To me it is shameful that a leader of my country made such a mockery of free speech and attempted to bully organizations into censorship, so the name of my country has that tarnish associated with it. In light humor, blogger Giribala Joshi paid a satirical: “tribute to the upholder of communal harmony and decency in the Indian society, respected Shri Shri Kapil Sibal Ji.” Also a poem parodied one of Kapil Sibal’s poem: Unknown Content Unknown content It beckons us We must just Censor it. Blogger Bharat C Jain like many others points towards the political undertone to a matter that otherwise appears an information technology subject, and says that such pre-screening would have been acceptable had it only been for national security. Sibal's directive would have been alright if it were directed in the context of our national interest and the country's security – like anything anti-national and spreading of hate content.