Governments worldwide are no longer hesitant to crack down on social media companies and their executives. In August, Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested in France as part of a broad investigation into criminal activity on the platform. Days later, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice blocked access to X, one of the country’s most popular social networks, amid a showdown with owner Elon Musk. And this month a Washington D.C. district court will hear arguments about whether the U.S. government can ban TikTok.
Lost in the noise generated by these high-profile disputes, India’s attempts to regulate Western social platforms have received little attention. That may change soon, though, as two recent court cases concerning Wikipedia raised alarms after a high-court judge threatened to ban the encyclopedia if identified users weren’t unmasked and a spokesperson for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) labeled the site as part of the “Western deep state.”
Wikipedia’s parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation, is accustomed to such legal threats, many of which are documented in a lengthy Wikipedia article titled “Litigation involving the Wikimedia Foundation.” In similar previous cases, the San Francisco-based nonprofit has always affirmed that it is “strongly committed to protecting the privacy of editors and users on Wikimedia projects.” To this end, its privacy policy explicitly states it collects “very little personal information” about users.
