NEW DELHI : The Indian government’s efforts to remove mentions of an ‘Indian variant’ of the coronavirus from social media have raised concern among users and privacy experts.
The directive has no legal ground, some experts said, while others contended that if platforms comply with the norms, thousands of posts that may not be offensive could be affected.The government, in a letter to social media companies last week, said the World Health Organization (WHO) had classified the variant as B.1.617.
The term ‘Indian variant’ was without basis, it said.However, tech policy analyst Prasanto K. Roy pointed out that the Indian government itself has referred to earlier variants of the virus by the name of the countries they were found in, such as.