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Good Law and Bad Law - The fine line

On November-11th Kerala State announced an amendment in law which stirred up trouble. Kerala Governor, Arif Khan, has signed an ordinance mainstreaming section -118(A) in Kerala Police Act. It now reads; 

whoever makes, expresses, publishes or disseminates through any kind of mode of communication, any matter or subject for threatening, abusing, humiliating or defaming a person or class of persons, knowing it to be false and that causes injury to the mind, reputation or property of such person or class of persons or any other person in whom they have interest shall on conviction, be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years or with fine which may extend to ten thousand rupees or with both.

According to Chief Minister, it is a necessary step to curb the cyber bullying and verbal raping, which is prevalent in social media. And also the ambit of this law covers all media, printed and digital. This, as usual sent all media personnel to a frenzy. 

Personally speaking  I support the law because I think its genuinely gonna help reducing bullying and verbal abusing that happens all the time on social media. This law will instills fear in the minds of anyone who is thing of doing something abusive or rude. Fake News and Fake Propagandas that keep spreading in the social platforms need to cut down. Studies are even conducted on how propagandas inversely effect our thinking and health. 

The driving force of propagandas are "fear". Fear stops us from thinking critically and analytically. Studies say there is an "Executive Control Network" in our brain which keeps up our high level functioning. But fear blocks or suppresses the functioning of this executive network. And there is this "Illusory truth Effect" which is used to describe  how fake news and misinformation are spread like wild fire by neuro scientists. Illusory truth effect works because of a phenomenon called "cognitive fluency," which means how easily can we process information. The more easier a message to process the more easily it is trusted. If we feel uncomfortable hearing an information then it would be tough to trust that info easily.

Photo by CQF-Avocat from Pexels
But of course it's like two sides of a coin. The other side is where  Government leverages this law to silence their political opponents. otherwise a non-cognizable offence, using this Police can arrest anyone without a warrant. It could be used as a political leverage. It gives serious power to Police, who themselves can use to extract personal vendettas. Most of the media people are looking at Supreme Court now, as it had struck down section 66, a similar IT Act in 2015, as their last resort.







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Comments

  1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 30, 2020 at 2:10 PM

    There's a need to curb falsehood in the public domain. But not the way Pinarayi government did it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. SujithMarch 26, 2021 at 8:20 AM

    I agree with you sir

    ReplyDelete

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