Karnataka has decided to hold a meeting with senior executives of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram to seek their inputs on how they can filter out “inflammatory” and “objectionable” content and prevent those from being posted on their platforms.
“We plan to hold this meeting in about a week’s time,” home minister Basavaraj Bommai told ET on Sunday.
The government will also involve cybercrime experts in the meeting.
“There has been a lot of content going around in the social media that aims to harm social harmony, cause strife, and incite violence. It does not serve any purpose to remove such inflammatory content after the society pays a price and the damage is done,” the minister said.
Karnataka’s move comes in the context of the sudden eruption of violence on Tuesday night in northeast Bengaluru over a Facebook post. The objectionable post allegedly put out by a youth sparked bloody violence, attacks on police, and destruction of properties culminating in police firing, killing three people.
The emphasis of the meeting, the home minister said, will be to seek the cooperation of social media companies within the framework of law, and request them to come up with a mechanism by which they can “voluntarily” remove such content that appears to have the potential to cause trouble. “We will request them if they can develop some sort of a filter so that objectionable content doesn’t make it to their platforms,” Bommai said.
The government is aware of the challenges involved in getting everybody on the same page, and to respond to the state’s request because they are all headquartered in the US, and the Internet is beyond the confines of geographical boundaries. “In fact, there has been a worldwide debate on this. In India, we don’t have a law to prevent objectionable content making it to the social media,” the minister said.
“Then there is also the challenge of what if someone from outside of India puts out inflammatory posts with an aim to create trouble in our state. I think we will need strong regulations to prevent such posts in the interest of maintaining peace, and law & order,” Bommai said.
The purpose of the meeting with social media giants, he said, was not limited to content around communal aspects, but also other derogatory stuff that would invade privacy and harm reputations. Then there are also posts with the sole aim of committing cyber frauds, bank frauds etc. There have been about 14,000 complaints in four months related to such fraud, and these can be prevented if these posts are filtered out beforehand, Bommai said.
Leave a Reply