Indian government asks social networking sites to screen content before posting

After arm twisting Blackberry makers, the Indian government is now seeking filtering of online content that appears on social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut and Google+. The Indian government’s telecommunication minister Mr. Kapil Sibal is holding meetings with top IT industry executives on how they can pre-screen the content posted on the social networking sites to exclude defamatory, derogatory, lewd, and religious comments.

Apparently this all started when something derogatory appeared on Facebook about Ms. Sonia Gandhi (who is the leader of the ruling party) and this has not gone well with the government . Mr Sibal then called the top executives and showed them the defamatory content and pointed out that such content is just not acceptable and the companies have to have some kind of screening mechanism before such content appeared online. Infact reports suggest that Mr. Sibal wanted some kind human intervention to the pre-screening and didn’t want an automated way.

This has created a huge nationwide discussion where liberals have called this move by Mr. Sibal as unconstitutional and against freedom of expression. Many feel that this kind of policing by the government is unjustified. However the government is clear on its stand – clean the content or you will be blocked. The industry executives have reportedly acknowledged the problem of bad content but have expressed their inability to have a human pre-screening mechanism. Facebook has over 25 million users in India and Google has over 100 million internet users. Trying to have an human interface monitoring that kind of traffic is going to be impossible.

This story is far from over and things may change rapidly over the next few days. Stay Tuned!!