Why Delhi HC is angry with Wikipedia for calling ANI a ‘government propaganda tool’
The attempt by the courts to gag the online encyclopedia has raised concerns about online free speech in India.
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It started off as a defamation suit against Wikipedia for a descrption of the Asian News International wire service as “a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government” involved in “distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, misreporting events on multiple occasions, and quoting sources that do not exist”. It came to a head on Wednesday with the Delhi High Court oordering the online encyclopedia to take down a page on the defamation suit.
This unusual gag order against an encyclopedia demonstrates the limits of applying conventional legal principles to global online platforms like Wikipedia, the inability of the High Court to meaningfully engage with how Wikipedia functions and raises concernes about online free speech in India.
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia edited by volunteers. It is owned by the United States-based non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
Scroll explains why Wikipedia is under the court scanner and the public interest stakes in this case.
Defamation suit
In July, ANI sued Wikipedia in the Delhi High Court, alleging that the Wikipedia page about it contained a defamatory description of the newswire. ANI not only claimed that the description is defamatory but that Wikipedia was not allowing the page to be edited – presumably by ANI to remove the allegedly defamatory content. It...
