Impact of Increased Social Media Usage in India on National Security: Challenges and Opportunities

This paper analyses the opportunities and challenges created for national security by the rise of social media applications and their increased usage in India and argues that the whole phenomenon has affected the Indian security landscape at three identifiable levels: Individual, Societal, and National. The individual level elucidates the issues faced by individual social media users in India, and what are the available grievance redressal mechanisms for them, whereas the state level divulges the group/social level realities of the Indian society that have become more overtly visible on social media platforms and its responses to perceived misuse of social media applications.

The state level explains the security-related problem perceptions and responses by India’s government and private sector to the evolution of social media phenomena, through its – proactive steps, global collaborations, use of force legal remedies, and consensus-building initiatives.

Methodologically, it is based largely on the analysis of the primary and secondary data sources, a sample survey, interviews, books, articles, and reports. By analyzing the problem conceptualizations and responses to the opportunities and challenges created by increased social media usage, by the Indian population, this paper seeks to spark a discourse among researchers working in this field within India and other countries as well and pave the way for further work on comparative researches with global case studies.

It concludes with the observations that this whole phenomenon is more of a human–management problem than technical, and in this digital era driven by information and communications technology wherein the security priorities of countries are assumed to have shifted towards the non-traditional domain, state sovereignty, and strategic autonomy remain sacrosanct for the Indian state as they form the core of India’s responses to the security challenges created by social media usage, and more so, since the Indian state has not been able to come to terms with the loss of monopoly over creating and disseminating information and erosion of state monopoly on violence.

It struggles to understand the multi-layered opportunities and challenges in its entirety and given the extensive diversity of the nation, India’s compartmentalized initiatives could not yield the desired results.

Having missed the chance to fully benefit from the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century and the Technological Revolution in the 20th century, if adequate steps are not taken now, India stands a chance to lose out on the 21st-century digital revolution as well, and this is something that this civilization having a heritage of spirituality and consciousness cannot afford to let happen, as the social media phenomena are much bigger than just a security challenge – the bigger picture is about the control of human minds and perceptions, the very way in which people sense, perceive, and think about the world around them and respond to it.

Keywords: Social media, Apps, Content, Security challenges, Platform, Opportunities