The Indian government has forced the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to remove the inflammatory content. The government said that the rumours had caused an exodus of migrants from cities last week.
In a statement the government said that it has already blocked access to 245 web pages and it said that it contained doctored videos and images. The telecommunications secretary R Chandrasekhar has threatened legal action against the websites if they did not fully comply with the request to take down the offending pages.
Chandrasekhar while taking to the reporters said that Google and Facebook had largely complied with the government’s request while the response from Twitter was extremely poor, though the he added, “this may be in part because they don’t have an office in India”.
On the other hand Twitter officials were not immediately available for comments. A statement from the government said, “A lot of inflammatory and harmful content/information has been found to be appearing on the social networking sites hosted outside the country”. The statement added that it met the representatives of the social media on August 17, 2012 to push its case. The crackdown on the content is likely to once again rekindle the debate on the freedom of Speech.
