It looks like India’s Supreme Court has just struck down a controversial law that would have enabled police to arrest people – and the reason for doing so would be the nature of comments on social networks as well as other online sites. The highly controversial Section 66A of the Information Technology Act was ruled to be unconstitutional by the Indian court, which would certainly be a victory for the masses as such a law would definitely clamp down on freedom of expression.
Of course, in the past few years, there has been a handful of people who have been arrested after the nature of their comments on the likes of Facebook or Twitter was deemed to be seditious in nature, and needless to say, those arrests sparked outrage along the way. The government did try to defend such a law, citing that it is meant to be a deterrent so that folks will not upload offensive material of any kind.
It took mere minutes of Tuesday’s court order to see #Sec66A end up trending on Twitter, where a huge number of people from the world’s second most populous country applauded the ruling. I suppose this is a step in the right direction, and hopefully other countries with somewhat similar laws will move in the same direction, too.