Tuesday, December 6th 2011
Cornered Indian Ruling Party Proposes Internet and Social Media Censorship à-la China
India's United Progressive Alliance government is mulling censorship of the internet à-la China, to filter out any content that speaks against members of the ruling party. India's multi-partisan democracy is increasingly making use of the web as a medium of political discourse and exchange, something that only works to make voters more informed. Union minister of IT and Telecommunications Kapil Sibal kicked off a storm this week when he announced that he is in talks with representatives of search engines and social networking websites, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Microsoft to work out a censorship model that filters content that "unfairly maligns" the government. Apart from anti-government content, the government is concerned about hateful or "blasphemous" content, which could disturb communal harmony. "Some of the content which is being carried is blasphemous. This can hurt religious sentiments and it has to be removed," Sibal said.
Google, fresh out of a censorship and GMail espionage tussle with China, stated that it will not remove any content from its search results that are legal, merely on grounds of being "controversial". "We work really hard to both follow the law and also give people as much access to information as we can. So we follow the law when it comes to illegal content. And even where content is legal but breaks our own terms and conditions we take that down too, once we've been notified about it," said Google in a statement. "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."
Facebook, on the other hand, sounded more cooperative about Sibal's plan. "[Facebook] will remove any content that violates our terms, which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service," it stated. Facebook said it recognises the government's interest in minimising the amount of abusive content that is available online and will continue to engage with the Indian authorities as they debate on the issue. Opposition parties slammed the government. The current United Progressive Alliance government finds itself cornered with allegations of corruption spanning across various ministries.
Source:
New York Times
Google, fresh out of a censorship and GMail espionage tussle with China, stated that it will not remove any content from its search results that are legal, merely on grounds of being "controversial". "We work really hard to both follow the law and also give people as much access to information as we can. So we follow the law when it comes to illegal content. And even where content is legal but breaks our own terms and conditions we take that down too, once we've been notified about it," said Google in a statement. "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."
40 Comments on Cornered Indian Ruling Party Proposes Internet and Social Media Censorship à-la China
Otherwise, yea, its dumb, its too late to try "chaining" teh interwebs.
These abuses should be reported about everywhere and often.
It should be like, we don't give a fuck about you loser politicians.
Serve them up their balls.
I don't know much about the political atmosphere in India, but I sure as hell didn't come to tPU to read about THAT.
Going to read all of his articles with a grain of salt from now on.
Meh.
Don't let the whingers distract you from writing a cutting article telling it like it is. ;) :)
And this is not about Indian politics. It's about internet censorship. If a 1.2 billion strong democracy censors its internet, smaller democracies are next in line with something similar. It doesn't matter if India is the flawed democracy that is, it doesn't matter if yours isn't. It's about the standards of "what's kosher in a 21st century democracy". America is already taking a big step in that direction with ProtectIP (an all-out net-censorship legislation masquerading as an "anti-piracy" one).
Somehow Bulldozer managed to win...............
His post as it stands now if very interesting and informative. Had no clue about the situation in India.
Those that don't like it, well, gee, ain't that just awful. If reading a post you don't like is the worst thing that happens to you, count yourself lucky.
we need the uncut version of news and you guys do a damn good job