India's telecommunication minsiter Kapil Sibal recently met the representatives of networking sites like Google,Yahoo and Facebook on 5th Sept,2011 to discuss the Indian Government's idea of prescreening of users' data being posted on the social networking sites.Previously, the New York Times’ India Ink blog had also reported that Indian government has asked ISPs and sites like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to prescreen user generated content from India.
India’s acting telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal stated in a press conference recently that the Indian government doesn’t believe in censorship but instead they were seeking co-operation from the intermediaries to develop mechanisms on their own to ensure that defamatory, obscene and inflammatory material are removed as soon as they know about it.
The thought behind is not to peep into user data and make people insecure about it .The government wants to keep Facebook and other sites as a neutral and free platform where users can share and pour in their day-to-day experiences and data.
The companies were initially hesitant even to share the user email ids of some users linked as terrorists.However Kapil Sibal finally stated that they then currently started working on a solution within the government, which will ensure that objectionable content is not allowed, stressing on that fact that the Indian government does not want to interfere with the freedom of the press.
After the initial meeting,Kapil Sibal claimed that he followed it up with multiple reminders on 3rd October and 19th October which were met with no response.Thus finally on 29th November, he reportedly asked for their written responses and a week later, i.e. on 5th December, the companies responded back saying that they cannot do anything, indicating that US community standards apply to their platforms.
Recent news pouring in is that the Social networking giant FACEBOOK has responded to this request of Indian Government to prescreen and eliminate “objectionable” user generated content stating that it understands the government’s interest in minimizing abusive content online.