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."
PR Giveaway (Score:5, Insightful)
It's in Facebook's best interest to say no anyway (since censoring comments would only make people want to leave and thus would reduce revenue at the additional cost of developer time), and by doing so they appear to be heroic. This was perhaps the easiest press release ever.
Facebook's position (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, everyone's really quick to jump on them and claim it's because they have profit motive in having more data. I won't deny that, but there are other factors that are possibly more important.
Human-scanning every single message would be nearly impossible. Even if they managed to handle the staffing problem, they couldn't afford it. And even if they could afford it, there's the ethical issues it presents.
There are plenty of other reasons for them to decline.
Dear India... (Score:3, Insightful)
Your own bloody, medieval, sectarian clusterfucks... [wikipedia.org]
How about you work on the "brutal violence in response to hurt feelings about whose invisible friend is better" problem and then worry about scary things on the internet?
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Insightful)
"In unrelated news, Facebook tells India it will grandly give them all secret profile information on any indian national no matter what country they live in, they may even give them a few non indians to sweeten the deal."
Re:Duh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:fuck the curry pakis (Score:5, Insightful)