Hyderabad: With the penetration of social media like Facebook and Twitter increasing in India, the legal demands of the government and law and order to withhold content or remove accounts is on the rise because of the content put out on these accounts. India is in third place, behind Turkey and Russia, in reaching out to these platforms asking that tweets be removed or to censor accounts. The governments, both the state and Centre, requested that more than 1,141 accounts be withheld in 2017 as per twitter transparency report. However, only 3 per cent of these demands were catered to by twitter as these accounts violated Twitter rules related to terrorism and impersonation.
Of all the requests, Twitter withheld 17 accounts and 32 tweets in response to legal demands received from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under Section 69A of the India Information Technology Act, 2000, for propagating objectionable content.
Two accounts were related to Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and Dera Sacha Sauda. Some of the accounts which were withheld by twitter were related to Kashmiri and Islamic activists, as per Buzzfeed database.
Removal requests include worldwide legal demands from governments and other authorized reporters, as well as reports based on local law(s) from trusted reporters and non-governmental organisations, to remove or withhold content. Facebook from a high of 30,126 content restrictions in 2015, saw a significant drop to 3142 restrictions in India in 2017. As far as facebook was concerned, a majority of the content restricted was alleged to violate Indian laws relating to the defamation of religion, hate speech, and defamation of the state.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Cyber Crime) K.C.S. Raghuvir, “Facebook has more content that needs to be removed as everyone is using this platform. The penetration of twitter is not as much so the numbers of restrictions are less. In Hyderabad about 250-300 such requests are sent to facebook every year to take down content especially which is communally sensitive or incites violence.”
He added that over the past two years, facebook had become more sensitive towards such requests and had responded immediately. Another CID official said, “We reach out to the platforms to remove content only when a complaint is filed. Consequently the numbers of such requests are less from our end, just running into hundreds. There might be many such players where the content needs to be withheld.”
However the officials couldn’t say why there was a drastic decrease in the withholding of pages on facebook. Officials also pointed out that the withheld account holder could create another account as well and that platforms do not totally bar them.
M. Ramesh, DCP (East Zone) said, “There are lakhs of people abusing the twitter platform as they do not act responsibly. They are so courageous on social media, that they engage in a war of words. If the platform suspends an account, it cannot bar such a person from opening another account. This needs to be addressed.”
