New Delhi: The Indian government will not allow social networking sites to host "objectionable" content and will take steps to screen and remove these, Communications Minister Kapil Sibal said yesterday.
Sibal said this a day after representatives from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft during a meeting with him declined to remove offensive content.
Sibal said some of the content available on these sites could hurt the religious sentiments of a large section of communities in India. "Religious sentiments of many communities and of any reasonable person is being hurt because of content which is on the sites," he told reporters here.
Sonia in bad light
The minister said he had first met with officials of Facebook, Twitter and Orkut on September 5 to discuss the concerns of the government over objectionable pictures being posted on their sites by users.
The pictures, which were shown off the record, depicted Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a bad light, while some others were insulting to various religions. "Nobody minds satirical image of any public personality but if you show a certain form of me... this is not acceptable. Even individuals should be protected," said Sibal.
The minister said these firms were hesitant to even share information relating to terrorist activities.
"They will have to give us data, then there will be actions taken. We will ask them to give information. Allow us time to deal with it. But one thing is sure we will not allow this kind of content," Sibal said on being asked about the contours of the actions to be taken.
Sibal, however, did not say what the steps could be.
The secretary, department of telecommunications, R. Chandrashekhar, had also called a meeting with them on October 19 and it was decided that a framework would be prepared for the code of conduct of the intermediary in cases of these kinds of material or content.
"They orally agreed to many of the clauses but in a written reply did not agree to any of the clauses," he added.
After a series of meetings, the companies did not provide a solution to the problem and did not remove the content either saying that they will take any action only if the ministry came with court orders.
