Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Tells India It Won't Help Censor the Web
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."
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.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Y'know what "hurts community sentiment" more than all the trolls in the world, no matter how socially malformed, photoshop adept, and equipped with free time equal only to their misanthropy?
Your own bloody, medieval, sectarian clusterfucks...
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?
"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."
Free speech shouldn't be used as a blatant cover for why they aren't censoring. They should tell the truth, that censorship would interrupt their revenue stream.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
"fuck the pakis" certainly would not be on India's list of banned sentiments.