Facebook Tells India It Won't Help Censor the Web 168
An anonymous reader writes "Indian Communications and IT minister Kapil Sibal yesterday announced a proposal to have technology companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Twitter pre-screen user generated content so that community sentiments are not hurt. Social media platforms are being asked to censor whatever politicians deem objectionable and too offensive for the Internet. Sibal called a news conference when the story broke, and following it, Facebook responded to say that it can't help in the effort."
Simple (Score:5, Informative)
Facebook doesn't want to censor: they want free flow of as much information as possible. The more that's out there, the more data they have to mine and sell.
Re:PR Giveaway (Score:5, Informative)
Small Internet user base? Little country? Are we still discussing India?
There are more Indians online than British people. India is 6th. CIA world factbook [cia.gov] (and that's from 2009, I wouldn't be surprised if India is now ahead of Germany. Most Germans who want to be online are; that's not the case for India.)
Let's have some respect for the world's largest democracy, please.
I wish it were just a third world problem.. (Score:3, Informative)
I wish I could be smug just laugh at India and its stupid corrupt politicians.
Unfortunately this kind of hare brained ideas aren't limited to the third world.
In Australia the filtering plan seems to be on hold for now, but you don't even need a slippery slope argument to know how batshit insane and scary the idea of a secret internet censorship blacklist is: http://nocleanfeed.com/ [nocleanfeed.com]
Or have we already forgotten the UK plan to censor social media during times of social unrest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-day-five-aftermath-live#block-33 [guardian.co.uk]
Think of how easily that could be used in the style of the Arab governments to cripple organised protests against the government.
Or we can mock India for wanting to intercept and read Blackberry messages, and ignore the implications of legislation like the Patriot Act: http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/12/02/1923207/patriot-act-clouds-picture-for-tech [slashdot.org]
Or have we forgotten the domain seizures to try to block pirated content with no due legal process: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/domain-seizures-defended/ [wired.com]
Even extending to attempts to block a Firefox add on: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20060636-281.html [cnet.com]
Blocking sports streams when they still cannot find a way of offering pay per view streaming of major sports events over the internet, where your only way of viewing a couple of hours of sports content a week is to sign up for an expensive cable package that gives lots of stuff you will never watch and THEN purchase an extra expensive add on for the sports content. And the US government is protecting that business model by seizing domains with no legal notice or court enforced legal process.
I would love to be able to just mock India, if we could afford to be that complacent...