Folks at Pakistan Telecommunication Authority shouldn’t feel isolated because of their revolutionary SMS filtering concept, in fact their counterparts in India went a step ahead and asked Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other major internet services to prescreen user content before it’s uploaded on their websites to make sure that no disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content ever goes online again.
New York Times, quoting a senior official of a major internet service company, said that legal representatives of Facebook, Google, Yahoo were asked by Kapil Sibal, India’s acting telecommunications minister, to monitor and control what is posted on their sites.
Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi. “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites.
You will be amazed to know that Indian Telecom minister expected these internet Giants to use human beings to screen content, not technology. He explicitly told representatives to arrange staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted.
Isn’t this wow? yes, indeed it is, and suggests that Minister isn’t aware of the magnitude of data being posted on social networking websites each minute.
It merits mentioning here India has 25 million Facebook users while 100 million Indians have ability to access internet daily.
Reuters later reports that Internet Giants have communicated Mr. Sibal that his demands are not realistic, which Mr. Sibal didn’t know before today.