2019 Online Safety Challenges for India

India has a new Government! Well actually it's the old government, but with a stronger mandate than in 2014. India’s Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi is considered to be one of the most powerful men in the World! And in my opinion rightly so.


As spider man rightly said "With great power comes great responsibility". In 2019 India faces some major challenges if seen from the Online Safety perspective. In this blog series we will be looking into each aspect in detail. For today I am just highlighting the broad topics.

Fake News: Hitting epidemic status during Lok Sabha Elections, this major failure of the Internet needs solutions, as it is damaging the most important aspect of a democracy informed choice or the voter. We did a detailed survey on the effects of Fake news on the elections. Now is the need for concrete action against it !

Cyber Crime: India is turning into a hub for cyber crime, not only national but also international. At the moment there is minimal awareness about cyber crime amongst our Police and Judiciary and this leads to very low reporting of Cyber crime in India, usually only in metropolitan cities and that too if one is influential enough.

Abusive Trolling: Reporters, Activists, Actors, Politicians, any one with a micro influence has been through it on the Internet. While platforms try their best to curb this menace, they seem to fail more often than they succeed. And its time we looked into the laws protecting Indian citizens in online spaces.

Radicalization through Social Media: This is an extremely complex issue, and one that needs a lot of team work to tackle. Starting from home and educational institutions to involving social media platforms and AI, we pretty much need all hands on deck to resolve this one. Sadly we have not had a proactive approach towards this.

There are many more topics when it comes to online safety, though we would like to focus on these four to start off. Also we want to focus on solutions and stray away blame games. It's not about who did not do their work in the past, it's about what has to be done to create a safer digital future!