Naavi.org

This is the picture of Robyn Rihanna Fenty is a Barbadian singer, actress, and businesswoman. According to reports in the Internet, this girl was paid Rs 18 crores to tweet to prompt discussion on what is called “Farmer’s Protest” in India.

This growling girl is Greta Thunbeg who has been allegedly paid Rs 7.5 crores to post a plan on how to conduct an information war on India using the so called “Farmer’s agitation.

Both Rihana and Greta can be called Information Gladiators who are willing to enter into a combat for a consideration.

Here is a larger list of the price of some information gladiators as published on Twitter

Read here for more details  about  the Information war economy which appears to be developing as a branch of the “Darkweb”.

Rihana is supposed to have 100 million followers and therefore the amount of Rs 2.5 million is a payment for endorsing the statement to these followers. In other words the payment is 0.025 US dollars or around Rs 1.75 per exposure in advertising terms.

In fact Gita Thumberg’s “Tool kit” is more valuable in terms of the content and it was interesting to observe her Twitter follower chart.

The followership of Greta is reported differently in different websites and mixed up with Twitter and Instagram. Taking the followership as about 4.9 million followers and her payment of Rs 7.5 crores amounts to Rs 15.40 for the tweet with the toolkit. Some estimates place the following of Greta at around 10 million in which case her support to the Khalistani movement might have been valued at around Rs 7.5 per exposure.

On the other hand Narendra Modi’s twitter following is placed around 65 million and Rahul Gandhi following is placed around 17 million.

In terms of valuation of advertising potential, it is not only the number of exposures that should be counted but also the quality of the exposure. In this respect, followers of Modi and Rahul Gandhi are the political target audience for the two politicians and are valued much more than the followers of Rihana or Greta.

Hence one tweet of Mr Narendra Modi is valued much more than these tweets of the Information Gladiators.

Rihana followers may be mostly music lovers and they would largely ignore the message. The hype is only created by the media based on the number of followers.

Greta’s exposure is different because it represents part of the conspiracy to promote unrest in India and may be considered directly as an offence under Section 66F of Indian Information Technology Act 2000, namely promotion of  “Cyber Terrorism” . I wish Delhi Police register a case naming Greta Thunberg under Section 66F of ITA 2000/8 and ask for Interpol to arrest her and extradite her to India.

At the same time we should also inform her followers that the Punjabi farmer’s agitation is directly promoting their environmental vandalism through stubble burning which adversely affects the air quality in Delhi and needs to be regulated. Greta’s support to the agitation is therefore against the cause of “Environment” which is her published goal.

It is necessary for Mr Modi to counter Greta’s influence (whatever it is) with his own tweets and it will reach more relevant audience than Greta can influence.

Naavi

PS: Some of my professional friends would be unhappy about Naavi.org taking up this cause against misuse of Twitter to discredit India. My view on this is as follows.

Many of the Indian intellectuals who consider themselves as “Professionals” try to keep themselves away from the controversy by remaining silent when such Information war is in progress are doing a disservice to the country. Most of us cannot join a war on the borders. But we can join the war in the Information warfare. Let us therefore be true to our conscience and fight for a cause to stop the disinformation engaged in by these Rihanas and Gretas..

Naavi

Twitter started as a microblogging platform in 2006. In the last 14 years it has grown to about 330 million monthly active users of which about 40% (145 million) use it on a daily basis. (Refer here). Over the last few years, the twitter growth has hit a plateau and even marginally declined.

India is the third largest market for Twitter and there are an estimated 18.9 million users (There are other higher estimates also). Recently the US user base would have shrunk because some of the Trump supporters quit Twitter and migrated to other platforms.

But social media other platforms like You Tube and FaceBook, are much more used  than Twitter.

In India, Twitter was popularized by the TV Channels and anchors like Mr Arnab Goswami who started linking the TV debates to the Twitter hashtags. This cross media selling helped Twitter to become a platform to express political views tied to the day’s debate.

The biggest strength of Twitter is that it has now reached a certain level of operations at which it looks attractive as a social media. Hence advertisers place a value which gets reflected in the market capitalization.

But Internet has seen the downfall of Alta Vista, Orkut and marginalization of Yahoo.com. It has seen the death of Napster with 20 million loyal users at one time. So it is not unthinkable that Twitter cannot die or at least becomes less prominent as it is now.

After WhatsApp triggering a debate on its Privacy Policy, Signal and Telegram grew to such an extent that today people have either moved out of WhatsApp altogether or atleast distribute their transactions with multiple apps. Over a period, equilibrium would be reached but new entrants would perhaps move to the alternate platforms directly while part of the current users may remain with WhatsApp. The growth will therefore be definitely affected.

We can expect a similar effect on Twitter also. The key to Twitter success in India is that today NaMo and PMO along with all the Government ministries have Twitter accounts. the MPs, MLAs have their accounts. All media vehicles have their accounts. As a result, lot of political discussions occur on Twitter platform.

In case the Government decides to move out of Twitter onto an alternate platform, then over night Twitter popularity will fall. The general users will also feel that if their views are not reaching the political masters what is the use of posting in Twitter. The opposition parties will continue to use Twitter since they are part of the international “News Manipulator Syndicate” which is paid for their campaigns. But such campaigns will lose steam when the main stream media in India and the more serious media users stop viewing them.

Twitter has taken a decision to project itself as an authority that can take on the Indian Government and refuse to obey the orders under Section 69(A). This is a legal non compliance and irrespective of their global moral ground, is still a violation that can be punished with the complete blocking of Twitter in Indian ISPs.

There is no doubt that such a move will attract some reference to the Supreme Court on the “Freedom of Speech” issue. But twitter is a commercial foreign company and is not entitled to the “Right to Freedom of Speech” as a fundamental right under our constitution.

Twitter has given up its status as an “Intermediary” under ITA 2000/8 since it resorts to its own content censorship and does not remain a neutral platform. It is not strictly a “Media” since it is a “Blogging Platform” where “Individual Opinions” form the content and this is not “News” per se.

Twitter’s position today in comparison to   news paper is that in a news paper of say 16 pages, 14 pages are made out of “Letters to the Editor”, one page of news and one page of advertisement. This cannot be equated to a “Media” and given the status of the “Fourth Pillar of Democracy”.

Twitter has its own content regulation team with its own bias of ideology which is anti-Trump in USA and anti-Modi in India. It is used as a platform to promote a “Promote Anarchy in India” tool kit which is part of the “Information War” on India.

Hence India has every right to block Twitter.

Obviously, blocking Twitter overnight would create a vacuum in the social media space. But people will quickly adjust to the situation and move over to TV channels or Messaging groups for information exchange.

However, it is always better to have an alternative so that people can move over. At present Koo and Tooter appear to be two alternatives available in India.

Both apps need to prove that they are able to scale up to a much higher level in terms of their ability to meet the sudden upsurge of membership if it happens. But no business was born in a day and given the right kind of support it is possible for these apps to become useful alternatives to Twitter.

I would urge all those who would like to fight the Twitter attitude to shift to one of these apps or try both for the time being and ensure that our national self reliant attitude gets reflected.

But the challenge has to be first accepted by the MeitY. Vested interests wield an enormous influence in the decisions of MeitY and it has always fallen short of courage when action is required to be taken against foreign tech giants. Even now MeitY is unlikely to take the next step of blocking Twitter for which it has the necessary legal powers just now.

If MeitY goes ahead and executes the block, Twitter will go to Supreme Court and let the Supreme Court debate the issue. MeitY should defend it’s stand on the basis of its “Duty” to defend the nation against “Information Warfare”.

On the other hand if MeitY develops cold feet, it is likely that Twitter or their anti national agents in India will file their own petitions first in the Supreme Court and prevent the Government from taking action for the time being with a stay or a caveat.

As regards bringing pressure on Twitter, we urge the Government of India to shift all its activities on Twitter at present to Tooter or Koo or both. Let there be a “Twitter Silence” for some time so that twitter understands what it is to challenge the Indian sovereignty.

It is a common knowledge that collaboration is only possible when there is a mutual perception of power. If Twitter thinks it is more powerful than the Indian Government, it is time for the Indian Government to show that Twitter is wrong. Indian Government of the day has the popular support and the people of India by majority endorse the current Government action.

All this façade of “Farmer’s Protest” is only a mask for “Anti India” cyber war.

It would be fair if the MeitY does make a public announcement that they recognize that India is in an Information Warfare with a group of Khalistani supporters along with the traditional Pakistani Jihadis and their decision to block Twitter is guided by the national interest to defend our information boundaries.

Let us as citizens of India join the fight and adopt a campaign “Twitter Silence” by displaying the following banner on all our Internet assets.

Naavi

A Cyber war has erupted in the social media led by Twitter. India is the target of this war and an attempt is made by the Khalistani supporters settled in Canada and elsewhere to destabilize the Indian Government.  These anti India forces are taking the support of the Indian politicians and the opportunity presented by the protests against the farm laws to launch a Cyber World war on India. A time has come for the Indian Government to stand firm and fight.

Twitter has taken a conscious decision to be part of this Anti India political campaign and disobeyed the orders of the Government under Section 69 (A) of ITA 2000 which is the law of the land. It has been promoting anti India propaganda which is carried on by vested political interests with false narration. This is unbecoming of any organization carrying the tag of a “Social Media”.

In the past, Twitter is known to be sympathetic to Pakistani interests. Its “Verified” status was provided more on the basis of political affiliation and was disputed frequently with rejection of genuine requests while fake accounts proliferated.

Most of the celebrity twitter handles have been managed by their PR agencies and were not managed by the verified owner. This fact is not properly disclosed on the Twitter system. The tweets and re-tweets have been often influenced by political ideology and may be even monetary considerations. As a result, Twitter was slowly degenerating into a form of “Corrupt Media”.

This degeneration of Twitter has now turned into a conspiratorial attack on India. When Twitter took on Mr Donald Trump and removed his account, they took the moral high stand that they were preventing fake posts that could disturb the society. However, in taking a decision to remove the account as against flagging the disputed post, Twitter was showing its arrogance to be the “Content Manipulator”.

Contractually, Twitter is well within its right to impose a condition that its platform should not be used to spread hatred etc. But taking a view whether a content is objectionable or not requires a due process and a reference to the judiciary of a country. Even when urgent action is required, the approach should be to post a red flag for the objected content, block out specific words etc and refer the matter to a Court for permission to remove the content so that “Right to Free Speech” is not violated.

But Twitter went ahead and deleted Trump’s account following which Trump followers started exiting Twitter en-mass. Many new social media channels have surfaced to replace Twitter in the aftermath of this Trump Controversy. Just as WhatsApp suffered a migration of users to Telegram and Signal, Twitter is also facing migration to Minds, LBRY and Sessions, according to media reports.

India’s pride Zoho came up with “Arattai” as a potential indigenous replacement of WhatsApp and though it is in its beginning and is yet to be  formally launched, there is an indication that WhatsApp will never get back to its previous glory because it ignored the consumer sentiments. A similar situation may develop in the Twitter also. Already some apps like “Tooter” are trying to occupy  small spaces in the “Short Messaging Service”  and it will not be long before Zoho or another IT platforms start a robust platform that can challenge Twitter.

The existing telecom players themselves can overnight set up such services by modifying and replicating their SMS system on to a cloud platform. NIC can itself set up a message board system to immediately substitute Twitter and create a dedicated site search engine to substitute the “Twitter hash tags”. Later it can introduce the system of retweets, notifications etc.

Twitter has chosen to support a gang of motivated persons who are posting false and provocative tweets saying that Indian Government is carrying out a genocide on farmers.

It must be placed on record that the persons posing themselves as farmers and carrying on a protest on the borders of Delhi are not real farmers. Some of them may be rich land holders who can afford to protest for political reasons. They have tractors which they can use to kill or threaten to kill police and innocent bystanders as well as media persons reporting the agitation. They can manage mobile restaurants with automatic roti making machines deployed to serve fast food to the agitators. They are supporters of a separate sikh state of Khalistan and representatives of Pakistan disguised in turbans. They are the people who carried out terrorist activities including hijacking planes and killing thousands of persons in India and elsewhere.

The reason these agitators are protesting is that the some of the reformist farm laws passed by the Indian Parliament are helping the real farmers to realize a higher farm revenue while the intermediary traders lose their commission. It is alleged that a huge amount of farmer’s income was being siphoned off by the Mandi’s and Regulated Markets (APMC) as commission and it was funding several political leaders who owned control of these facilities.  The new laws actually donot dismantle any of the existing facilities including the “Minimum Support Price system” . However it introduces a choice to the farmers to sell their produce outside the APMCs if they want. It gives them a choice to contractually sell their produce before production so that they are insured against any loss on account of reasons such as natural calamities.

Hence neither the agitators are real farmers nor the cause of their protest is justified. In fact the protest itself is “Anti-Farmer”.

It is possible that some of the agitators are unaware of the real advantage of the farm laws and have been misled with speculative fear spread by the opposition leaders. It is also possible that the protestors are paid money to participate in the protest. There is clear evidence that some protest leaders are threatening the farmers in the villages to send protest representatives or face coercive action. This is nothing but “Terrorism”.

The Government so far is handling the protest with kid gloves because there are a set of media managers in India who are  part of the fake news cartel.

It is now time for the Indian Government to act firm. The Government has to take action to withdraw all accounts of ministries, including the account of PMO and Modi from Twitter and transfer it to another platform.

At the same time, Twitter by refusing to obey the Indian Government’s order under Section 69 (A) of ITA 2000/8 has committed a legal transgression and has lost its right to continue to be present in India. The Government has every right to block Twitter now and should proceed to take this decision simultaneously with the moving of its account to other platforms. The citizens will follow.

Let us therefore start the movement to quit twitter and migrate to other platforms. Naavi is already on Tooter and is waiting for other platforms to surface. The critical factor in such migration is that it has to be en-masse to succeed.

I urge Jio, Airtel, Vi and NIC as well as Zoho to each start a Short Messaging platform and allow posting of messages for public and group wise sharing of messages without waiting further. One of these five can potentially grow into a global force and challenge Twitter on the global platform.

Naavi

Naavi.org has often referred to individual security professionals losing their sense of proportion and turning into hacktivists and degenerating into  black hat hackers. While they often have a justification for their actions, “taking law into own hands” is not considered the right thing. This tendency has been referred to as “Technology Intoxication”.

Now we see organizations like Twitter being bitten by this bug which makes them feel that they are above law. First Twitter showed its arrogance by deleting the account of Mr Trump without a Court order. Irrespective of what Trump’s tweet meant, Twitter had no right to stand in judicial shoes to remove the account. It ought to have moved on its own the relevant Court and sought directions to take action. In the meantime they could have tagged the subject tweet as “Disputed” or “Unverified” etc and ensured that no person would take it as an authenticated news. But they went ahead and removed Mr Trump’s account and faced an exodus of Trump supporters.

Now in the case of India , Twitter has again shown its arrogance in a different way. Here the Government of India as per the law in force in the country had requested for ban on certain accounts which were blatantly inciting anarchy in India. This was a call for a war in a democratic country and deserves to be treated as such.

It appears that the celebrity twitter accounts are actually maintained by PR firms and the recent anti India propaganda has been launched by these PR firms. Twitter must be aware that these are proxy accounts and the messages are being sent by persons other than the projected twitter handle owners. Twitter is known to have  an anti India bias and they provide “Verified” tags according to their own rules. Hence even when they indicate an account as “Verified”, it is not reliable.

While responding to the Indian situation, Twitter has taken a stand to retain the accounts which are dishing out false and provocative tweets  and  rejected the Government of India’s request despite its legitimacy  as per law. This is plain and simple revolt against law and inconsistent with their stand in the Trump case.

Twitter may think that it has the fan following to indulge in such arbitrary actions and challenge the Indian Government, but this is more  than a show of any ideological stand.

If Twitter does not agree with the Government order and wants to disobey, the only option available to it was to approach the Supreme Court for a stay on the Government’s order.

This they have failed to do and now it is time for the Government of India to take appropriate action.

The first action that the Government has to take is to block Twitter from the whole of India. Let Twitter go to the Court and seek a remedy.

The second action is for all Government department and executives including Mr Narendra Modi and PMO to shift to an Indian competitor such as “Tooter”. Tooter may presently find it difficult to take up a high level of traffic and a consortium of Indian IT companies particularly companies like Zoho should support Tooter to stabilize its services.

Once Mr Modi and PMO withdraw from Twitter, the private individuals can also withdraw their accounts from Twitter and move to Tooter or other alternatives. We have seen how WhatsApp lost over 30% of its clientele within a week of its proposed change of Privacy policy. If Twitter faces a backlash, it is unlikely to survive.

Next, it is time for all Twitter advertisers from India to withdraw their advertisement support.

If these actions are taken tonight, Twitter will realize that its actions were not prudent either from the legal view point or business viewpoint.

I look forward to a firm and decisive action from the Government of India.

Naavi

[P.S: Immediately after the publication of this article, a representative from the Franchisee visited the premises and set right the connectivity. The problem therefore was resolved. The MD of the Franchisee personally intervened to resolve the issue. I thank him for his prompt action.]

Recently, BSNL has introduced FTTH services for Internet through Fiber a Bangalore. Based on a marketing call from BSNL offering conversion of the existing copper line connection to Fiber connection, I opted for the conversion. Since then it has been a nightmare leading to my asking BSNL to revert my service back to the Copper line status.

During the last one month the two departments of BSNL, the Copper wire team which is losing one account and the FTTH team which is gaining a new account are fighting with each other and my connection went dead just two days after it was activated.

Along with the Internet, even the telephone line also has not been working.  As an  existing telephone subscriber opting for this service, I have been subjected to a denial of even the existing services.

The installation was done by a franchisee who supplied the modem and completed the wiring at a cost of Rs 4500/-. I had to later also get my electrician and spend some money to get the wiring properly laid out.

Initially, as soon as the request for the service was registered, before the new connection was provided, the earlier telephone line was disconnected. So for nearly 3 weeks the existing telephone went dead before the installation of the modem. The telephone line now runs through the modem and if there is any disruption of the cable, my telephone would also go off. Since this is an overhead cable like the TV cable operator, the possibility of cable being cut by some body is also possible. If it happens, it is not only the Internet which goes down but also the telephone.

The new connection which was activated after about 3 weeks worked for two days. By that time due date for payment of the telephone bill arrived and on receipt of reminder, payment was made through the BSNL portal as usual.

But now I find that the billing department of the Copper team has not accounted the payment and the FTTH team has promptly and without notice disconnected both the Internet and the telephone.

After speaking to the relevant persons, I get a feeling that this inter departmental rivalry will not allow this service to be effective. Any time in the future also, each month I need to check whether the bill payment is going to the Copper team or the FTTH team.

I have therefore asked BSNL to withdraw the connection and restore my copper line since I am interested in retaining the land line connection.

Though this would result in a loss of over Rs 6000/- to me for having tried to support the new service of BSNL, I would like every new customer thinking of a similar connection to carefully consider whether they need to avail of this service.

Even during the two days, the connectivity has not been great and there is no reason why the service should be preferred.

I think it is time for BSNL to stop marketing this service to avoid it being termed a scam.

I am forwarding this incident report to the BSNL top management as well as the DOT and see if there is any resolution.

In the meantime, I would request all customers not to opt for the scheme which is poorly designed and avoid switching over from their copper line to the FTTH line. I donot believe that even if the connection had been a new connection directly from the FTTH team, the service would have been better.

Naavi