Indian Gov't Bans Bulk SMS, Investigating Social Media 101
saiful76 writes "Following mass exodus of people belonging to north-east states India from southern states of India, specially Bangalore, allegedly due to the threatening messages, the government has asked relevant agencies to scan all social media platforms to check for inflammatory and offensive content, following which, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DIT) has issued an advisory to all intermediaries in terms of provisions of IT Act and Rules to take action for disabling all such content on priority. Cellphone operators have been told to block all bulk SMSs and videos — so nobody can send a message to more than five people at a time."
Few corrections (Score:5, Informative)
The ban on bulk SMS is for 15 days at the most. This is not censorship, but an effort to avoid mass hysteria.
Those of you who know India will understand what I mean. Even before the era of mobile phones it was somhow easy to spread roumours and generate hysteria in India. For example read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_milk_miracle/ [wikipedia.org] for one hysteria of 1995 regarding idols that drink milk, or 2006 where sea water turned sweet.
These efforts are to help crub the new hysteria. But I am doubtful about its effectiveness.
Re:Alleged cause? (Score:5, Informative)
You already seem to have a grasp of the situation here in India.
People of northeast of India have a mongoloid features, which marks them as different from rest of Indians that have aryan features.
There is some ethenic violence going on in Assam, a state in notheast of India, between Bodo (ethenic Assames people with mongoloid features) and Muslims. So other Norhteastern people living in rest of India are therened by Muslims.
Most of these people are students and migran labours. Their parents got worried about their safety and called them back. Mass hysteria got generated when evey norhteastern person just started exodus from rest of India back to their hometown.
Re:And... (Score:0, Informative)
India is overwhelmingly Hindu
.. and also has more mohammedans than pakistan.
Re:And... (Score:4, Informative)
A sensible approach to this would be to keep drawing Muhammad and whatever else until these mud people completely exterminate themselves.
Unfortunately, our culture has its own major flaw: "tolerance."
Of course Islam describes itself as 'a religion of peace and tolerance' but I'm not sure exactly what Arabic words get translated as 'peace' and as 'tolerance', there seems to be some... misunderstanding involved.
The Arabic word for "peace" is "salam". And yes, it's the same root as "islam".
There are probably many more peaceful/tolerant muslims in the world than there are Christians, but it's the "Fred Phelp's" groups that get all the attention, not the Lutherans down the block.