This comment and others on this thread are downright bizarre. It seems some get a perverse pleasure from seeing this ban happen in India, perhaps as a result of anger against what the platforms do in America. I’ve only ever seen this attitude on HN threads about China. It’s a little scary as an Indian to see people bring this rhetoric to India, as if clamping down on the free exchange of information is laudable.

This ban isn’t because of some noble notions of protecting the public discourse. To the contrary, it seems the intention is to suppress it. It’s no secret that the Modi government is irked by criticisms of it on Twitter; it attempted to censor hundreds of tweets critical of its handling of the pandemic. Whatever the government may claim as its reasons for the (currently hypothetical) ban, it seems awfully convenient that it gets to remove the platforms which so many use to voice dissent.

One of the benefits of social media platforms is that they insulate dissenters through anonymity, and the law precipitating this ban also threatens to undermine this power by making these platforms responsible for tracing the originators of information it deems unacceptable. This is not a country where you want the government to have this power. To give you an example of what could go wrong, people in Uttar Pradesh (an Indian state) have been harassed by cops just for asking for oxygen on Twitter and Instagram for their relatives dying of COVID-19. This was because the state government wanted to cover up oxygen shortages. You can just about expect that through this law, the government will be able to find and punish those spreading what it considers wrongthink.

To your point, Indian public discourse is hardly "controlled by the moral pieties of the American elite class." Although there are in absolute numbers millions of Indians on these platforms, they are hardly a blip in the Indian population. Further, millions of Indians including myself also espouse Western values and subscribe to the “American social order” that comments in this thread implicitly refer to. Given that India is a free country, it isn’t for the government to decide whether this is good or bad, any more than the government should be able to decide which god I should worship or which school my kids should go to. India is already a massively heterogeneous country; no Indian is being forced to buy into “the moral pieties of the American elite class,” since these social media networks are strictly optional. But banning them will force people who believe similar things to find alternate places to express them, likely local alternatives where their views will be penalized. Personally, I use Twitter and Instagram to engage with people from around the world, and this will effectively restrict my ability to communicate with many of them.

You can read more about the chilling effects of these laws in this post [1] by the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian nonprofit. (One interesting byproduct of the fact that these laws require originators of information to be traceable is that they effectively constitute a ban on encryption, which I’m sure HN can appreciate is Not Good And Also Very Bad.) I don't expect that these laws will stand, since the reasoning behind them seems blatantly unconstitutional and contrary to the Indian constitution's protections for privacy and free expression.

[1] https://internetfreedom.in/pound-the-alarm-the-clock-strikes...