An Indian government demand that social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, remove any content that refers to the “Indian variant” of COVID-19, even though it originated in India.
New Delhi’s information technology ministry is claiming that mentions of the Indian mutant strain are misleading and “without basis” because there is no scientific reason to link it to India.
“It has come to our knowledge that a false statement is being circulated online which implies that an ‘Indian variant’ of coronavirus is spreading across the countries. This is completely FALSE,” the letter said.
Social media experts, however, said the government’s latest order on Friday was an “impingement” on the freedom of expression.
“There is no law which allows the India government to ask for this kind of censorship,” Nikhil Pahwa, said the founder of MediaNama, a mobile and digital news portal.
Other countries such as South Africa and the UK (with the so-called ‘Kent strain’) have also had their name attached to mutant variants of the coronavirus.
The WHO and the establishment media in America blasted President Donald Trump for referring to the original outbreak of COVID-19 as the “China virus” despite China being the origin of the virus.
The notion that correctly pinpointing where a virus originated is somehow bigoted or racist even extended to travel bans in the early weeks of the pandemic, which the WHO warned against, saying it could lead to the “stigmatization” of Chinese people.
Forsided, 24.05.2021
Source: Summit News