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| - Fact Check: When 'fact-checks' mislead! Internet was actually shut down at least 49 times in J&K in 2022
After the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir was revoked, internet shutdowns became rampant in the valley. Now, a post on social media refuting internet shutdowns in Kashmir in 2022 is going viral.
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India Today Fact Check
There were at least 49 shutdowns in Jammu and Kashmir in 2022 as per government orders.
The internet is abuzz with media reports of India being the internet shutdown capital of the world. Shutdowns became rampant in the Kashmir valley, especially after the special autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir was revoked in August 2019. To quell protests, the Centre resorted to harsh measures like disrupting internet and telecom services in the region. Its longest-ever shutdown was lifted in February 2021.
According to an estimate, frequent internet outages cost India Rs. 20,973 crore.
Now, a post on social media refuting internet shutdowns in Kashmir in 2022 is going viral. A Twitter account that goes by the name Counter Disinformation Centre ostensibly "fact-checked" a few media reports on incessant shutdowns in Kashmir in 2022, and claimed that not even once was the internet blocked there that year.
The tweet reads, "Disinformation by @Scroll_in with the false claim that 'Jammu and Kashmir recorded the highest Internet disruptions in the world last year'. Fact: Last year, in 2022, the internet was suspended, not even a single time in Kashmir."
The second tweet in the thread read, "The Internet, Mobile & Landline facilities remain functional all over Jammu and Kashmir without any hindrance, except for one time that too in Jammu’s Rajouri district on 04-October 2022 for security reasons based on specific inputs only for a few hours." This was accompanied by a screenshot of a tweet by InternetShutdowns.in.
AFWA fact-checked this "fact-check" and concluded that the "facts" presented by the tweet were untrue. This is how we arrived at the conclusion.
AFWA Probe
We started off by looking at the laws around internet suspension in India. The suspension of internet services in the country is governed by the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency & Public Safety) Rules, 2017, notified under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. The competent authority to suspend authority rests with the Secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs at the Centre and the Secretary of the Home Department to the concerned State Government.
Once the appropriate authority was identified, we visited the Home Department of the state to locate orders issued for suspending internet services. As per the Home Department website, 49 suspension orders were issued in 2022 alone. A total of 278 orders were issued since May 2015. A copy of one such order can be accessed here.
We also spoke to Radhika Jhalani, the Volunteer Legal Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Centre, a nonprofit that runs InternetShutdowns.in. InternetShutdowns.in, whose tweet was also supposedly "fact-checked" by the Counter Disinformation Centre, maintains a real-time database of internet shutdowns across India.
"The Internet Shutdowns Tracker is a cross-verifiable source. Data on the tracker is either corroborated against news reports or orders available in the public domain. No shutdown on the Tracker is without a verifiable news report or a Government order," said Jhalani, who leads the Internet Shutdowns project, told AFWA.
She further added that her organisation regularly files Right to Information requests to gather data around shutdowns in each state. "Orders which come in with responses are also sources which we use to verify past and present shutdowns and add any missing data," she said.
Thus, it’s clear that the claim that there were no internet shutdowns in Kashmir in 2022 was categorically false.
It is noteworthy that both inside and outside parliament, statistics of internet shutdowns across India have been a topic of hot debate. In 2022, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology came out with a report "Suspension of Telecom and Internet Services and Its Impact" that emphasised the need for defining the parameters and setting up a robust mechanism for internet shutdowns. The committee, which is headed by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, remarked that there was no central database for recording instances of internet shutdowns ordered throughout the country.
(Written by Vikas Bhadauria)
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