Issues with Social Networking (in India and perhaps elsewhere)
Tim Finin, 1:00pm 4 September 2007Akshay blogged recently about the growth of social networking in India. Which is great and wonderful, but it has brought out interesting issues that seem country specific. Not surprisingly, given that it has the largest share of the social network “market” in India, Orkut figures prominently in most of them.
Perhaps the easiest ones to think about are those related to politics. Recently, it was big news in India that someone had created an Orkut community that claimed to “hate” the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ms. Mayawati[1,2,3]. The news media reported that the chief minister was infuriated, the police were trying to figure out how to stop this, and lawyers were figuring out whether the cyber crime laws in India covered this, and how to fix them if they don’t 
Of course, one element of this community was a fake profile of Ms. Mayawati, which Orkut promptly removed. Politicians in India are often extremely touchy about such things. One state assembly (i.e. legislature) in India was particularly notorious for its speaker using his “priviledges/contempt” power to punish those in the media that were critical(see page 35 of [4] for one of the more recent examples, and of course Wikipedia for a discussion of the concept of parliamentary contempt and privilege notions). I am not sure if there are fake profiles of say George Bush on Orkut, or communities dedicated to hating him (Hmmmm……, maybe DailyKos qualifies?), but I have not seen much of a discussion about this issue here. Perhaps this is governed by how thick or thin skinned politicians in a country are ? That said, Al Gore’s recent Vanity Fair interview seemed to bring out a lot of his misgivings about the US MSM and how he felt he was mistreated during the ‘00 campaign[8].
Orkut also got into trouble for groups that criticized famous historical figures that are revered by significant sections of the Indian populace. One example of this was Orkut communities that proclaimed hate for Chatrapati Shivaji, a famous king of western and middle India [5]. There was apparently even a “hate india” community.
Fake profiles are of course fairly common in social networking sites in the US. I am not sure though if they have been used to spread watercooler rumors, or present a real (non celebrity) person in a poor or lewd light. Orkut has been so used in India it seems. There was a case of a high schooler in New Delhi who suddenly started getting phone calls of a lewd nature. Turns out that someone had posted a fake profile on Orkut where she was presented as someone of, how to put it delicately, less than stellar virtue. Messages had been sent out from this site to others inviting them for (you can figure out what). There is at least one other known case of something similar happening to an airhostess (aka flight attendant). These stories all made it to the MSM[6]. I haven’t really seen too much discussion of such issues in the MSM here in the US, except for the Allison Stokke story in WaPo [7]. Of course there it was not so much about an explicitly suggestive fake profile but about pictures taken at a track meet. Is this because such things have not happened ? Or people are more blase about them ? Either way, is this a country/culture specific issue ?
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[1] http://www.srajaram.com/2007/08/i-hate-mayawati.html
[2] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Mayawatis_fake_profiles_removed_from_Orkut/rssarticleshow/2317819.cms
[3] http://ibnlive.com/news/mayawati-all-over-orkut-up-babus-go-into-a-tizzy/47548-3.html
[4] http://www.ifj-asia.org/files/sa_sapress_freedom_report2003-2004.pdf
[5] http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=77287
[6] http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/feb/06orkut.htm
[7] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052801370.html
[8] http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/10/gore200710
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Ebiquity Blog
March 1st, 2008 at 6:20 am
Hi Tim,
This is a very nice and comprehensive analysis of social networking related issues in India.
Based on our experience as it relates to social networking in India vis-Ã -vis politics, we can state that there seems to be at the least a considerable amount of interest in political matters from the online community here in India.
We ran mock polls and forums on two state legislative assembly elections last year (2007) and the number of posts exceeded 1000 for one state and 400 on the other one:
http://www.jeetegakaun.in/gujarat_elections_2007/all_comments.php
http://www.jeetegakaun.in/himachal_pradesh_elections_2007/all_comments.php
What was particularly notable was a post by the then sitting Chief Minister of the state of Himachal Pradesh (authenticity of which was verified by us), followed up with a post from his Media Cell.
This level of engagement with an almost unknown portal (we’re not particularly well-known yet) indicates at least strong interest.
We did receive our share of heated debates/posts and some protests/complaints while these two polls were active, as you’ve discussed in your post above.
Finally, we’re covering four more state elections presently (with some five more to come later this year) – it would be interesting to see where it all gets to.