MHA warns Twitter on blocking pages
The Union home ministry has communicated to the IT ministry to serve an ultimatum to social networking site Twitter if it does not block webpages which continue to host morphed and inflammatory contents.
Union home secretary R.K. Singh has asked the department of electronics and information technology
(Deit) to take punitive action against erring sites if they refuse to cooperate and comply with the government orders.
Nearly 30 webpages on Twitter are said to be hosting such morphed and inflammatory content still despite the government order. Mr Singh has told Deit to take appropriate action if the offending webpages are not blocked immediately.
However, Twitter has promised to cooperate with the government after the Prime Minister’s Office complained to it about objectionable content on six accounts resembling the PMO’s official account.
The government had rdered blocking of 310 webpages where morphed and inflammatory contents were uploaded with the aim to incite Muslims in India leading to mass exodus of people of the northeastern region from places in Karnataka, TN and Maharashtra.
Indications are the networking sites are relenting to the government pressure. The PMO had complained about objectionable content on six accounts resembling the PMO’s official account.
Twitter has communicated to the PMO that it would be locating the “unlawful content”. It has told the PMO it could not take action earlier “because the government entity didn’t intimate through proper procedure electronically to our system and hence the request was not located,” sources said.
Communications minister Kapil Sibal advocated setting up of a legal mechanism to initiate actions against those responsible for misusing social networking sites.
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