Facebook ‘looking into’ hiding of posts calling for PM’s resignation in India

> I don't know why twitter does this.

A reality of scaring social media companies with regulatory threats.

People call for regulation and unsurprisingly their priority becomes keeping those who might regulate them happy with them.

I guess in America there is a lot of the same with some groups of people believing they can pray the virus away or that it simply doesn't exist and is part of some satanic cults agenda.

What is "religious extremism"? That term always struck me as odd. Either the truth claims of a religion are true, somewhat true, or false.

If they're true (read: have sufficiently good reasons to believe them), then it's not extreme to live in accordance with them. In fact, it is arguably insane not to live in accordance with them. Imagine if someone said "Oh, I believe things fall to the ground when dropped, but I'm not an extremist about it". What does that mean?? That you only sort of believe that they fall to the ground? That you only sometimes avoid jumping off of bridges?

If they're somewhat true, then they need refinement and correction because they contain error.

If they're false, then it would be an error to follow them in any way.

So really, if what's being done is evil or wrong, it should maybe be called religious error, or just error.

They don't need bulk oxygen generated ad-hoc. They need medical grade oxygen delivered in standard medical equipment that they can use in a controlled manner right away.

Chemistry experiments won't solve this.

> I see oxygen production being such a basic industrial process, that I never could've imagined even a most poorly industrialised country having troubles producing it.

This article discusses some of the challenges being faced, sounds like most of them are around distribution. India has a large steel industry which is very capable of generating and condensing oxygen.

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/coronavirus-second-w...

You mention "poorly industrialised country" and then go on to list at least hundreds of dollars worth of equipment and supplies and access to a 200A 220V electrical service. A poor household in India has easy access to none of these resources.

    Do you guys still need oxygen there? How is the situation there really?

Then how did we get in to such a situation? The reason is the complete apathy of the government in planning and preparation.

While we are the largest producers of Oxygen in the world, we only have 2000 trucks to transport them. Failure to plan and improve the logistics is one of the reason why all are hospitals are now facing Oxygen scarcity, even though we have a surplus of it! The second reason is failure to upgrade existing infrastructure in hospitals.

According to an opposition leader, we exported 60 million vaccines between January and March of this year, while we had only vaccinated around 30 to 40 million of our own people!

Our vaccine plans also hit a hurdle when a US vaccine by Novavax, that has been licensed for production in India, is facing hurdles of getting the raw material for the vaccine from US (that has obviously prioritized it for its own needs).

According to the same opposition leader, we also exported around 1.1 million doses of Remdesivir to other countries. And our media is showing people desperate to buy Remdesivir from anywhere at any price.

In between all this, the government permitted huge gatherings of people in election rallies and religious occasions.

Summary: We had all the resources. But apathy and poor planning screwed up India's fight against COVID.

Wow, you make a lot of assumptions and failed to read the article.

The reports are that people's families are having to source meds and oxygen for their loved ones. The offending tweet was consistent with that and, to paraphrase a bit, consisted of a guy basically saying "Hey, does anyone know where I can get a tank of oxygen for my grandfather??" It seems the the grandfather died by the next day anyway.

The situation on the ground is actually that bad unfortunately that people are resorting to pleading and begging for Oxygen anywhere they can.

The number of frantic oxygen requests I've been seeing in my building society Whatsapp group (a high end upper-class society) in the past few days is very scary. VIPs and people with a lot of connection are not able to source Oxygen or beds which paints the picture if you know India.

YES! If you’re actually in India, you will know how useful Twitter has been with this. People are amplifying tweets about other people’s needs and other folks are sharing verified leads. All of this without any incentive to do so. Where the government is daily failing, citizens are rising to the occasion.

Many Indian politicians learned the exact opposite lesson from the 90s to 2000s when China's economy far outgrew India's despite the supposed geographical, labor, and education similarities between the two (i.e. see the debate from a western perspective in [1][2][3]).

The idea that democracy and free markets help with economic growth simply didn't pan out for India w.r.t. its neighbor and biggest rival. As far as Modi is concerned, why keep trying something that doesn't work? Especially when the alternative is self serving.

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2003/07/01/can-india-overtake-chin...

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/06/india-plays-catch-up/

[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/07/05/think-again-indias-rise...

Absolutely agree with this. In fact even if the minimum they do is walk back to how the country was before Modi, that would be a huge step forward. Not talking about politics here but just to a time when comedians and journalists didn't have to fear harassment for doing their jobs.

Also a fun fact - Modi has not done a single open, unscripted press conference in his entire 7 years of being in power! Can you actually believe that. He hasn't taken a single question on camera that was not pre-determined. Most likely because of the lesson he learned after the one interview he did with a reputed Journalist a while back before coming to power - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAGAYL8dtic

The effort that he puts into forming his public-image is actually impressive at some level.

>I don’t understand what Modi is doing.

I assure you, neither does he.

Not a particularly intellectual or introspective man. He is a living example of the Peter Principle.

Too bad a billion people have to suffer for his incompetence.

It is better to be a consumer than a west leaning producer. One would never advance when the primary market is outside the country.

This I find is true, globalisation is eventually failing as imo it was always about cheap labour never anything elss and nationalism is on rise. Every country protects rights, America being leader of free world have those patriotic acts where they stopped raw material in name of America first(full blown nationalism), that too when leader is from by democrat party(left)

Nationalism is on rise even Germany's chancellor gave some taste of it(on parma industry comment), but still democracy is all good in india as I see, where to do you see democracy falling in india?

P.s. pardon my english, still learning.

I think that says less about democracy and more about the US' former president.

Well, it kinda died in developing countries because of the west too. There was a sweet spot in human history where communication was strong enough and technology limited enough where some many groups managed to find themselves on the brink of democracy, and the USA and other powerful bully nations replaced those regimes to keep the exploitative world order.

It's no surprise with a house of cards like that that it all eventually collapsed. Extremely depressing though.

The US just had a pretty good election. Democracy is alive and well.

Here's the tweet:

https://twitter.com/khanumarfa/status/1386757457393770496?s=...

It's in the article as well. The text message was tweeted out.

I understand the wire can be considered left-leaning but does that automatically make everything they report on as false?

You can ignore their "alt-left" opinion but screenshots of texts and tweets are actual facts that happened.

He has charges against him for trying to find oxygen for his sick grandfather. What part of that does not involve the guy getting screwed?

Also, instead of criticizing the source, criticize the content.

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/health-library/diseases-and-con...

> Often a person who is having a heart attack is given oxygen, which also helps heart tissue damage to be less.

COVID isn't the only disease that requires oxygen.

So far as I can see, “alt left” is a recent neologism to denigrate anyone who opposed Trump. What do you mean when you describe them thusly?

Yeah I've heard about it and will be looking into this. But I haven't actually ever seen it in the wild anywhere online which makes me wonder why it hasn't gained traction much.

For a country like India, the solution needs to be dead simple. Exploring a mastadon server a bit, it doesn't feel like it would cut it.

Exactly, we already have the “censorship resistant social network” (gab), but for reasons completely unrelated to not restricting speech third parties seem hell bent on nuking it from orbit. Such is the fate of any similar social network.

The government can suggest it and they can choose to do it. No?

Censorship is censorship. No one cares about narrowly defining Freedom of Speech as conflated with the 1st Amendment except Americans .. and especially Americans who support censorship on giant monopolistic platforms.

So when democrats drag zuck in front of congress and ask why he isn't banning more right wingers, no government coercion?

When I was younger, the Left was pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship. Now I'm a bit older and the Right is pro free speech and against big corporations and corporate censorship.

It seems that the big factor is power. When you're in power, you use any excuse to silence the people who disagree. When you're not in power, you recognize that free speech is a universal principle.

The majority of the US is anti-abortion. Would you be fine if they cancelled the other side? Huge swaths are anti-gay. Should coming out mean people are free to cancel you? While the number of churchgoers is around half, the number of Christians in the US is well over 75%. Should claiming to be another religion (or no religion) mean that cancellation is in order?

Once everyone agrees that persecution is acceptable, all that's left is arguing about who to persecute.

The government is by the people and for the people. It reflects the values of the people. You claim that free speech is government only, but why does the government create ideas like hate speech then? Why force private people and businesses to desegregate if your inalienable rights only apply to the government? If rights are inherent in humans, but may be stripped at a whim by the majority, either they aren't actually rights or the pro-cancellation majority are actually despots.

The pro-cancellation argument is all sophistry to gain and increase power.

The First Amendment is about that. The principle is broader. We don't all accept restrictions on it.

Perhaps the issue is that the law does not protect free speech.

Couldn't Facebook just call it Misinformation? Certainly authoritarian enough for Silicon Valley to rally behind.

When you can define the laws, any content you dislike becomes "Illegal content".