India’s minister of information technology and communications is under fire for asking Internet companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo to prescreen user-generated content posted from India, according to published reports.
ITC Minister Kapil Sibal also asked these companies to remove “disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online,” The New York Times reported, quoting company executives who met with Sibal.
Sibal met with executives from the Indian offices of Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo three times, with the most recent meeting on Dec. 5. According to the Times report, in the first meeting Sibal showed the officials a Facebook page that maligned Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi. He termed it unacceptable and asked these companies “to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites,” the Times reported.
During the second meeting, in late November, the minister told the top officials that “he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology,” an official was quoted by the Times as saying.
The online community scorned Sibal’s proposals. “Mr Sibal’s brazenness is undermining the case for government to legitimately monitor communications networks,” tweeted Nitin Pai, editor of Pragati, a publication of an independent think tank on India’s strategic affairs.
“Kapil Sibal is making the same mistake Siddhartha Shankar Ray did to provoke the Emergency. Another Mrs G paid the price for it,” tweeted Pritish Nandy, a former senior journalist.
“India’s bloggers and Twitter users scorned the minister’s proposals, saying a prefiltering system would limit free expression and was impossible to implement,” the Times of India reported. Infact, out of the top 10 tags trending today on Twitter, five (#Kapil Sibal, #IdiotKapilSibal, #censorship, #Free Speech, #Freedom of Speech) were related to the issue.
In a statement, Facebook said, “We will remove any content that violates our terms, which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service.”
According to NDTV, Sibal addressed journalists today and said: “It was brought to my notice some of the images and content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google are extremely offensive to the religious sentiments of people of this country. I approached these platforms. I told them to come to me with a solution. This government does not believe in censorship. They came back to me and said we cannot help you.”
The latest row over content on social networking platforms comes after the Indian’s government’s attempts to monitor the data passing through BlackBerry’s BBM and corporate email services. The government also wants Skype and Gmail to make the data going through their networks available to security agencies in a readable format.
