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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."
Just deduct the costs for that bullshit from the his ministry's budget.
So this guy is so rich that he can afford to finance a whole industry of millions of workers to monitor the web? Well, that should solve a lot of economic problems in India! Maybe he could outsource some of those jobs over here!
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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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
He could call it the State Telecommunications And Security Initiative? I'll have to check now, I'm worried that STASI might be already taken...
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.
I got here through a series of tubes
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.
Balachandran "Arise Awake and Stop not till the goal is reached"
I know - we'll get half of the population to do the screening for each user request, and the other half to actually view it immediately afterwards. The lag shouldn't be too bad - only half a minute per HTML page view.
They can take it in turns, so that half of the population screens one week, and then following week, they're the viewers, and the other half screens.
And the icing on the cake: it will create more work, which results in more jobs too!
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I understand how he can ask, say, Facebook to remove disparaging content and screen for it. Stupid and a fundamentally massive and retarded task, to be sure.
But how in gods name did they think that ISPs have the ability to delete content on other and foreign sites?
India's It leaders literally do not understand the internet.
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
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
Possibility aside... it is appalling that the minister wants to pre-censor all the content generated by users. What he is suggesting is that all user generated content be reviewed before it goes online. This is just intolerance to opposing views.
Almost all social networking websites have a "report abuse" mechanism that is most probably checked by humans after some automated filtering. The point is why introduce censorship of any kind that can affect free speech in a democratic country.
I would have given him due credit if he had asked the websites to improve their abuse check mechanisms or asked for a faster resolution of reported posts / pages. But, his suggestion is to prevent any potentially objectionable post from going online. There is no way this can be justified in a free country.
YouTube [i.e., Google] is already providing some of the censorship this guy is asking for. Perhaps not for him yet, but certainly for the Chinese and Pakistani governments and various Muslim groups. And not just for overseas consumption: much of this censorship applies to content served in the U.S.
The last time Indian citizens protested against the Govt for Jan Lokpal (an anti-corruption bill) the protesters made use of sms, twitter & facebook.
A month after the protest the Govt passed a bill restricting the number of SMS that can be sent by a person to 100 SMS'es per day.
This looks like the next step.
No one expects fb or twitter to filter all user generated content... But it will certainly give the party in power an excuse to block these sites when the time comes.
Using 'think of the children' and 'hurting religious sentiments' as reasons for censoring is getting out of hand all over the world.
this guy is a known clown. all he wants to achieve out of this is to censor all anti-congress sentiments on the indian internets which has been on an incredible rise this year. he is getting what he deserves. look at #kapilsibal and #idiotkapilsibal
the ire is epic. the biggest democracy on the planet prides its free speech. snubbing that is going to take some doing.
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