Governance
Home Secy of India meets social media representatives, asks them to ‘prevent misuse’
Union Home Secretary of India Rajiv Gauba on Thursday met representatives from social media giants and asked them to prevent misuse of their platform by undesirable elements or miscreants to spread rumours, cause unrest, incite cyber crimes, ANI reported.
Union Home Secy along with senior officers of MHA, security agencies,MEITY, Dept of Telecommunications,held a meeting with representatives of Facebook,Google,Twitter,WhatsApp,YouTube&Instagram to review actions taken to prevent misuse of social media sites by undesirable elements
— ANI (@ANI) October 25, 2018
Union Home Secy Rajiv Gauba asked them to nominate India based Grievance Redressal Officers, develop a monitoring mechanism for time-bound preventive&other actions to remove objectionable contents from public view&prompt sharing of information sought by Law Enforcement Agencies.
— ANI (@ANI) October 25, 2018
He met representatives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Whatsapp, YouTube, Instagram today and asked them to nominate India-based Grievance Redressal Officers.
ALSO READ: Kashmir based online magazine’s page taken down by Facebook for ‘going against community standards’
The home secretary asked the social media companies to develop a monitoring mechanism for time-bound preventive and other actions to remove objectionable content from public view and prompt sharing of information sought by Law Enforcement Agencies, as per ANI.
Officials from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) were also with Gauba.
Misuse of social media platforms like Whatsapp and Facebook has led to several lynching incidents in the past in which innocent people were killed due to the spreading of rumours.
Over the past one year, the social media giant headed by Mark Zuckerberg has been embroiled in controversies ranging from censoring dozens of posts and user accounts in 2016, for poorly handling user account information by being susceptible to breaches or letting third parties use such information as tools for analysing voter tendencies.
Recently, Facebook took down news portal Kashmir Walla’s video featuring the militant’s father’s voice in the background. Mannan Wani along with his associate Ashiq Hussain Zargar of Tulwari Langate were killed in a gunfight with the Indian armed forces in the Shatgund area of Handwara town.
Mannan being a Phd scholar rose to fame after he joined Hizb ranks in January this year. After his killing, Facebook in Kashmir was flooded with his photographs. Some rare photographs of Mannan surfaced shortly after his killing, with social media being flooded with content.
An internal company briefing produced by Google and accessed by Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the “American tradition” of free speech on the internet is no longer viable.
ALSO READ: Google and Facebook censoring Kashmir? Leaked document ‘good censor’ might have clues
Moreover, a documentary series by Channel 4 Dispatches has revealed that moderators at Facebook are protecting far-right activists by preventing their pages from getting deleted even after they violate the rules set up by the social media giant.
