They are coming for our Facebook. And Instagram. And any other social media platform we might be on.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
In India the new income tax bill empowers the income tax authorities to access social media accounts and personal emails if they suspect any income tax evasion. Once they could break down doors and break into lockboxes. Now the law is handing them the key to a citizen’s “virtual digital space.” India Today TV
INDIA TODAY - This includes your email, your social media account, online financial platforms
Meanwhile in the USA the Trump administration says it needs to check the social media accounts of people applying for green cards or asylum or US citizenship. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) says social media surveillance is required to rigorously vet and screen those applying for immigration benefits.
For example Fulbright scholar and Ph.D student Ranjani Srinivasan was forced to flee the US after her student visa was revoked with authorities calling her a supporter of Hamas. Indian Express reports
INDIAN EXPRESS: What she didn't know what that her life was about to spiral into a complex web of federal immigration, enforcement, political speech and ultimately the decision to flee the USA
Both proposals have unsurprisingly sparked outrage and anger. Beatriz Lopez, the executive director of the pro-immigration group Catalyze/Citizens accusing the Trump administration of “turning online spaces into surveillance traps.” She warned “Today it’s immigrants, tomorrow it’s U.S. citizens who dissent with Trump and his administration.”
In India, the Opposition Congress party put out a social media post about the income tax proposal saying “Warning: Your privacy is under attack”
The pushback comes along predictable lines - privacy, freedom of speech, the right to dissent, nosy Big Brother government.
But there is another irony at play here.The government wants to look at our social media because they think the truth lies out there. Yet these days Facebook is really Fakebook, where most of us are just putting on a public performance not of the lives we actually lead, but the lives we want others to think we lead.
A site like Facebook was once all about sharing. Its original mission statement read “To give the people power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Now I might be connected to more people than I ever was. But I can’t really be more open BECAUSE I am connected to too many people.
Instead all social media is a stage and all of us are just players. Projecting a certain persona.
I am performing as “writer” on Facebook posting my latest articles. But I don’t talk about writer’s block or writerly insecurities and anxieties. On the other hand there are writers who revel in playing the tormented angst-ridden writer on social media. Or the lit-fest hopping literary jet-setter.
Some want to be more woke than thou, others only want to tell you about every trip to the Amex Goldcard hospitality lounge at the airport. Business-class selfies are mandatory. Or recount clever cute things their seven year old says everyday, wordplay that sounds suspiciously too clever for a seven year old. The most annoying might be the love bunnies, the ones who document their love affairs in nauseating detail.
The truth is social media cannot ever reveal our true selves because we are really creatures of many parts. The Facebooks of the world struggle to grasp that. After all it was created by and for university students where everyone was swimming in the same hormonally heated pools obsessing about sex, grades, parties and jobs. The real world gets a lot more complicated.
In the real world we can be Momma’s boy and Employee of the Month and Whisky Drinker and SngleManLking4NSAFun and MurderMysteryFan. There is no utopia where all those identities can be worn with equal ease.
In some ways we cannot fault the governments for wanting to poke around our social media worlds. They say you know truth by ferreting through someone’s garbage. They are merely “catching up to modernity.
Already there have been so many reports about job offers being rescinded because a prospective employer stumbled onto too many drunken party pics on someone’s website. Old tweets have come to haunt everyone from Oscar nominated actors to Trump administration hires. Perhaps that’s why so many of us now bare more in ephemeral stories on Instagram and vanishing messages on WhatsApp than in anything that can be preserved forever in digital amber.
But one thing is clear. Social media was meant to bear witness to our daily lives. Now it might well become a witness for the prosecution.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW