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IN Media Watch Briefs | 29/06/2016

Social media is a great place for grievance redressal. And happily, our ministers are increasingly responding to tweets to solve citizens’ problems. Recently, IT and communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad took note of a tweet about the absence of a post office in a remote village in Uttarakhand. Within days, he made sure that the village got its post office. Prasad is not alone. Others, such as foreign minister Sushma Swaraj and railway minister Suresh Prabhu too are extremely prompt about responding to tweets on citizens’ distress. This has raised expectations among some Twitterati, though. Earlier this month, a man tweeted to Swaraj, asking her to solve his crisis with a defective refrigerator! Are we going the way of the Spanish town of Jun that’s dumped its bureaucracy and uses Twitter for everything from reporting a crime to booking a doctor’s appointment? It’s a thought the Babus might want to ponder.        

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The new term for self censorship is voluntary censorship, as proposed by companies like Netflix and Hotstar. ET reports that streaming video service Amazon Prime is opposing a move by its peers to adopt a voluntary censorship code in anticipation of the Indian government coming up with its own rules. Amazon is resisting because it fears that it may alienate paying subscribers.                   

Clearly, the run to the 2019 elections is on. A journalist received a call from someone saying they were from Aajtak channel and were conducting a survey, asking whom she was going to vote for in 2019. On being told that her vote was secret, the caller assumed she wasn't going to vote for 'Modiji'. The caller, a woman, also didn't identify herself. A month or two earlier the same journalist received a call, this time from a man, asking if she was going to vote for the BSP.                 

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