Indian Minister Seeks To Censor User-Generated Content Online

First time accepted submitter punit_r writes "Indian minister for Communications & Information Technology Kapil Sibal met officials from Facebook, Google, YouTube and Yahoo on Monday, 5 December 2011, and told them to screen what goes on the sites. He basically asked the websites to actively screen content. How do you screen such massive amount of data? Well, the IT minister has the perfect recipe: 'We'll use humans to screen content and not technology,' said the IT minister. Meanwhile, he got it back from the social media."

Comments

Of-course

[roman_mir]

Of-course he wants to stop people from speaking. That's what all people in power want - to make sure that the masses never speak.

That's why individual liberties must be the primary concern of all people and that's why the principles upon which governments get established must put individual liberties ahead of all other concerns.

Corruption

[Wowsers]

If you hire all those humans to check the content, just think of all those minds that will be corrupted from the content they are supposed to sift through.

Re:Corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

You, on the other hand, seem to have become numb to the formerly outrageous violation of being routinely bodyscanned while traveling.

He's just trying to boost their economy

[Reverand Dave]

He's just trying to boost the Indian economy by creating a new sector of tech support people thus supporting the bubble and burgeoning middle class in India. The migration of millions of tech support and call center jobs has created a middle class in a formerly 2 tiered country. Now that they are starting to lose those jobs due to rising wages, he's looking to expand it is all. Oh, and you got to keep the people ignorant too.

Lack of tolerance

[benignbala]

The whole problem is because of lack of a tolerance to criticism. The actual reason is most probably someone wrote something really harsh about the policies adopted by his political party. And that is something the he couldn't take in his stride. Anyone who wants to have a public life, should also be ready to face the criticism. Curbing freedom and there by the criticism of the very people who elected you is something very cheap. And in addition to that, he had probably assumed that a large user base from India implied control of the industry. Imagine using humans to track each of those millions of posts on G+, FB, Twitter combined together. Absolutely foolish. If anything, he is tarnishing the image of the country. Hailing from India, what I sense is, he is anticipating a huge wave of protests from the people vis-a-vis the Jan Lokpal bill(a bill to fight corruption). His party is proposing a version which not really liked by a a lot of people. That bill is likely to be tabled sometime soon. And to get away from such criticism, he is going all out.

Re:Exactly!

[hihihihi]

it dosn't matter libraries or liberties.. the bastard and his government has taken care of that all.

just take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Literacy_in_India_1901_-_2011.PNG

for first 50 years of independence - him and people of his likes has taken complete care that masses remain illeterate. the jump seen after 1990 is *after* our oh-so-precious ministers were forced to open the economy.

and now they want to screen the content which they may not like... i am sure they will start with wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_in_India

Re:No problem

[Pi1grim]

Better to deduct it from his salary.