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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."
Of course not, censorship would hurt their business model. People need to share their dirt to sell it!
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Facebook doesn't want to censor: they want free flow of as much information as possible. The more that's out there, the more data they have to mine and sell.
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
I think it's interesting to see India asking for IT help.
If you want to filter something, block his campaign ads when it's time for re-election.
...Facebook...doing something....good? Does not Compute.
would like to be in control of ALL the information you have available. the internet is a thorn in government's sides, right now the benefits of the internet outweighs the liabilities and when that changes you can bet the US Gov will pull the plugs (like shutting down ICANN's root servers) among other things it wont kill it completely but it will kill most of it and joe and jane sixpack wont be going to infowars.com or whatever flavor of underground news and tinfoil hattery they like...
war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Didn't Mr. Sibal suggest that they will use humans to screen the contents?
Here's my suggestion: tie him down to a chair and pry open his eyelids clockwatch orange style, and then have him screen youtube comments for 8 hours.
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
They'll indvertantly have accumunated a lot of private info on Indian politicos and the State and accidently exposed it all through a defect in code, which will redirect all Indian FB users to pages of it, but for one day only, until they find the bug and fix it.
So there :P
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Exactly! Censorship is a form of privacy, and Facebook doesn't do that.
"fuck the pakis" certainly would not be on India's list of banned sentiments.
I wish I could be smug just laugh at India and its stupid corrupt politicians.
Unfortunately this kind of hare brained ideas aren't limited to the third world.
In Australia the filtering plan seems to be on hold for now, but you don't even need a slippery slope argument to know how batshit insane and scary the idea of a secret internet censorship blacklist is: http://nocleanfeed.com/
Or have we already forgotten the UK plan to censor social media during times of social unrest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-day-five-aftermath-live#block-33
Think of how easily that could be used in the style of the Arab governments to cripple organised protests against the government.
Or we can mock India for wanting to intercept and read Blackberry messages, and ignore the implications of legislation like the Patriot Act: http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/12/02/1923207/patriot-act-clouds-picture-for-tech
Or have we forgotten the domain seizures to try to block pirated content with no due legal process: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/domain-seizures-defended/
Even extending to attempts to block a Firefox add on: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20060636-281.html
Blocking sports streams when they still cannot find a way of offering pay per view streaming of major sports events over the internet, where your only way of viewing a couple of hours of sports content a week is to sign up for an expensive cable package that gives lots of stuff you will never watch and THEN purchase an extra expensive add on for the sports content. And the US government is protecting that business model by seizing domains with no legal notice or court enforced legal process.
I would love to be able to just mock India, if we could afford to be that complacent...