In growing tension between social networking websites and the government, communications minister Kapil Sibal said Tuesday his ministry will issue guidelines to ensure that obscene and defamatory material on religious figures and national leaders are not uploaded on such websites.
The social networking sites — Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo — had refused to pre-screen user data on their sites at a meeting with the government.
“If you and I have a problem and you want to solve the problem with me, we can evolve a mechanism... If you will not cooperate, we will have to take action,” Mr Sibal warned.
Google said in a statement while it was ready to follow the law, this “also means when content is legal but controversial we don’t remove it because people’s differing views should be respected, so long as they are legal.”
What added to the tension is that some officials of the American embassy in New Delhi apparently called up the communications ministry, asking it not to interfere with the social networking sites. “The US embassy called up the additional secretary in the department of telecom, saying: ‘What are you trying to do interfering?’ ... Who the hell are they?” said a top telecom official.
Mr Sibal said: “On September 5, the IT department brought to my notice certain images and statements on platforms like Google, Facebook, YouT-ube, Twitter... The subject matter was so offensive it would hurt the religious sentiments of large sections of the community and offe-nd any reasonable person looking at those images and reading those contents.”
The minister said at his meeting with representatives of these websites in September, he told them they should evolve a mechanism of their own to ensure such content was removed as soon they get to know of it. “I said: please come back to me with your solutions as this government doesn’t believe in censorship. Come with solutions you think are appropriate and reasonable,” said Mr Sibal.
At a meeting this week the websites refused to pre-screen user content. “They came and pretty much said we can’t do anything. They also suggested US community standards would apply here,” said Mr Sibal.