Social Media in India
Regulatory Needs, Issues and Challenges
- Francis P. Barclay - Assistant Professors at the Department of Media and Communication, School of Communication, Central University of Tamil Nadu, India
- Boobalakrishnan N. - Assistant Professors at the Department of Media and Communication, School of Communication, Central University of Tamil Nadu, India
Social Media in India: Regulatory Needs, Issues and Challenges reviews the values of freedom of expression, privacy and regulation, and proposes strategies to balance the triad, aiding policy formation, at a time when the Indian government and significant social media intermediaries are in a standoff over the newly ordained IT rules. This book covers all aspects that need to be examined for the overhaul of the regulatory framework including addiction, awareness, rampant misinformation, political applications and conflicts. Highlighting such social and user-centric challenges to the sustainability of online social networks, the book argues for the need of a robust regulatory framework and advocates an attitude adjustment about privacy and social media in the age of disinformation.
I find this a powerful book engaged in the quest of inspiring students, scholars and all of next-gen. This hands-on guide dwells upon a unique mix of contemporary socio-political issues related to the highly unregulated social media in India. This could be a practical handbook on fake news to the media fraternity as the recent years mark the era of disinformation, ‘alternative facts’ and ‘post truth’. My best wishes to the authors who've penned the much-needed topics clearly and accurately. The research done on various subjects is commendable. A must-read.
It is a pleasure to read this book on Social Media in India. It is majorly an outcome of an Impress project funded by the ICSSR to interrogate various issues related to social media in an age of media abundance. This volume is timely and addresses the contemporary tensions and anxieties through grounded empirical details related to issues of privacy, credibility, regulation and ethics. This volume is an asset to the field of new media studies in India.
Conventional understandings about social media and freedom of speech need a rethought to develop new social attitudes towards privacy. Providing empirical evidence with a wide array of studies in India, this book urges suitable cybersecurity and data protection legislation. Covering some of the most controversial aspects of social media, including information overdose, addiction, social media awareness, motivations, use and misuse, privacy, autonomy, and regulation, this book provides social scientists with a new understanding of the use and misuse of smartphones. This book will be helpful to policymakers in regulating social media and is a seminal resource for scholars of media, communication, psychology, political science, and all domains of social science.
Though much literature on social media has already been disseminated and with much more to come, this is undeniably a seminal and scholarly work that converges on the core issues related to social media users and its regulatory norms, strengthened by apt research data.