India's rocky road to social media independence

A new wave of local, or ‘swadeshi’, social-media start-ups aims to disrupt India's reliance on foreign platform–driven communications – but political backing and scant content moderation are red flags.

The term swadeshi originally meant economic, political and cultural independence from Britain, but today the word is imbued with nationalist, ‘made in India’ overtones. Swadeshi apps can be loosely defined as apps that are explicitly supportive of the present government’s nationalist agenda and willingly accept governmental control or those that are keen to establish an alternative to the dominance of Big Tech. Given the language diversity in India and the reality of Hindi-English dominance, there is ample scope for language and dialect-specific apps.