In Malayalam, the official language of the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, as well as in Sanskrit, the word lakshadweep means "hundred thousand islands". In fact, there are but 36 in the remote Indian archipelago of that name, which spreads across 32 sq km of the Arabian Sea, about 300km off Kerala's coast. Ten of those islands are inhabited by a total population of about 65,000, and none is wider than 1.6km. All of them, though, are under.
News organisation Al Jazeera Media Network on Sunday condemned the online harassment and death threats made by Hindutva social media users to Indian journalist Raqib Hameed Naik for his articles on the alleged misuse of Covid-19 relief funds in the United States.
The
Al Jazeeraarticles, published in April, said that federal Covid-19 relief funding amounting to $833,000 (over Rs 6.10 crore) had been given to the Hindu American Foundation and four other US foundations which, the reports alleged, had “ties to Hindu supremacist and religious groups”.
“Naik has already reported death threats to US law enforcement agencies but he continues to face online harassment from individuals and groups for merely doing his work,”
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How social media companies help authoritarian governments censor the internet Increasingly, the price of access to a global digital market is assisting the policing of online speech. The president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, was so outraged when Twitter deleted his post last Wednesday (2 June) that he ordered the country s mobile networks to block access to the social network and broadcasters to delete their accounts. While Buhari s comment – in which he appeared to threaten to return Nigeria to the appalling violence of its 1967 civil war – certainly looks like a violation of Twitter s policies, it s an unusual political intervention by the company (when Donald Trump threatened people protesting the murder of George Floyd with “shooting”, the post was merely flagged). More common are the requests governments make for the removal of posts that criticise them – and social media companies are often willing to comply.