Whatsapp, Signal and Telegram face a catch-22 situation as India’s new social media rules threaten encryption

Encryption is a safety blanket for many. It is the night light to keep nightmares away. But, that may no longer be the case with India’s new social media regulations.The Indian government thinks that it has found a loophole. It claims that it does not care about what messages are being passed around, but if an incident is found to have been instigated through social media, they want to know who started it all — they want to find the ‘first originator’.We don’t want the content, because the content is already out there in the form of tweets or messages. But, who began the mischief? This, they [social media platforms] will have to disclose,” said the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Ravi Shankar Prasad, while announcing India’s new IT rules on February 26