Published in News

Facebook will not censor the internet for the Indians

by on08 December 2011



Censor it yourself


The Indian government has been told by the social notworking site Facebook, that it will not censor posts written by those who don't like the ruling Congress party much.

Indian Communications and IT minister Kapil Sibal hauled the leading technology companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to demand that they pre-screen user content. Apparently he was incandescent with rage that people were going onto Facebook and saying nasty things about Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi.

Politicians are saints and the great unwashed should be lucky to ruled by such types and should certainly not stoop to posting nasty things on Facebook about them, he more or less implied. Facebook responded to say that it can’t help in the effort. It said it 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.

But slagging off politicians is not something that Facebook considers as violating terms of service after all that is free speech. If politicans did not want to be criticised they should take up a job which does not involve them having to hack people off. Sibal has has presented a draft framework on what it doesn’t want on the Internet. He is trying his best to be clever about it. He claims that India has so many religions that what might seem humorous to someone can be really offensive to another and he wants to avoid further incidents of communities taking to the streets and vandalizing public property.

However the only evidence he presented to the press were examples of people taking the Mickey out of politicians.

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