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The Government will soon formulate guidelines to regulate content on social networking Web sites, including Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
The Communications and IT Minister, Mr Kapil Sibal, on Tuesday said that the guidelines have been necessitated because the companies that own these Web sites have refused to remove ‘objectionable' content despite several requests.
“Despite repeated reminders, the management of these Web sites did not respond for a long time and, finally, they informed me that it was not possible for them to cooperate in this regard. Therefore, I have decided to formulate guidelines to deal with objectionable content,'' Mr Sibal said at a press conference without giving any time frame for enforcing the new rules.
He said that though the Government was not in favour of censorship, it would not allow offensive content on the social networking sites. “These companies told me that they work under the community standards of the US but our community standards are different,'' Mr Sibal said.
Though the Minister did not elaborate the meaning of ‘objectionable content', he showed some examples of morphed pictures with religious connotation uploaded on social networking sites.
Reacting to the Minister's comments, Facebook said it removes any content that violates its own terms but emphasised that it wants to be a platform where people can discuss things freely. The social networking giant has 38 million users in India.
Google said that it removes illegal content regularly but when content is legal and controversial, it does not remove it because “people's differing views should be respected so long as they are legal”.
Meanwhile, social media was abuzz with the issue so much so that hashtag (#) kapilsibal was the top trending topic on Twitter the whole day with some interesting observations from users.
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