India Asks Google, Facebook to Screen User Content

[threepointone]

Ridiculous - "At the meeting, 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."

I'm not allowed to criticize my government in a public forum? Pardon my language, but this is fucking ridiculous.

[yalogin]

Haa. Sonia Gandhi is not technically part of the government. But of course she is more powerful than the government.

[kijin]

> Mr. Sibal

> fucking ridiculous.

"Sibal" actually means "fucking" in Korean. Coincidence?

[suprgeek]

Not an unusual request considering the utter cluelessness and Sycophantic bootlicking of the people involved. Consider that the perceived slight is to the defacto head of India - Sonia Gandhi (a person with terrifying power but Zero accountability, completely outside the Govt.) this is being held up as the reason to institute an Orwellian nightmare of Censorship. A reasonable response is FU in nice terms.

[EDIT - minor spelling]

[bishnu]

Sonia Gandhi is an MP, she is not "completely outside the government". A few people have said this now, where is this talk coming from?

[tejaswiy]

Just. Wow. Mind boggling amounts of stupidity.

"In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said.

The three executives said Mr. Sibal has told these companies that he expects them to set up a proactive prescreening system, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted."

[tomjen3]

It is funny how much people who don't contribute to the world think they get to tell other people what to do.

[jimbobimbo]

Oh, so they are simply working on fixing unemployment problem in India! :)

[kijin]

Maybe they actually think it's realistic to hire a couple of million people to screen online content. After all, they have more than a billion people, and they also have extensive experience with their outsourced call centers.

[jjcm]

This seems to be a fairly reoccurring theme - countries requesting internet sites to mass censor user content. Rarely though do they understand the scale of what that means. In the article, it stated that they wanted each item to be screened by a human. In the same way that I'll quote a client a much larger price if they want IE6 support, I often don't see why these companies don't just quote the country a price for the manpower required to do this. Kind of a, "Listen, pay us X per year to hire people to do this. Otherwise, it's simply impossible for us to do, and we'll fight your request in court til the end of time." While I doubt any country would actually pay, I think it would serve to at least educate the politicians as to how much work censoring the internet actually requires.

[bad_user]

The request itself may be clueless, however you can easily mass censor content that contains certain keywords.

It can get pretty effective too, as is the case with spam filtering. You could even detect the tone of the article - if it's a positive or a negative one. Plus you can hellban the users too and they won't notice the censorship until much later.

So I don't get what a discussion of costs will bring, as there's always a cheaper way. Freedom of speech is the issue here, not cost.

[eCa]

This is what you get when you seriously consider making SOPA into law: "If you can get companies to strangle funds and kidnap domains of people saying that, can't you not also make this disappear?"

[jezclaremurugan]

Freedom of speech was the one advantage we had over other developing countries. I guess the Indian Gov was scared by the support the anti corruption movement got online.

[tomcreighton]

I'd like it if the companies asked to do this just pulled out of the country altogether. "Can't deal with the fundamental nature of the internet? No internet, then." It's needlessly vindictive on my part, but we've seen this story play out again and again. That's not how it works!

[dontblink]

The problem with what you suggest (ignoring the vindictiveness), is that the people pushing for these asinine rules would benefit from the consequences of the loss of the internet while the masses would instead be harmed.

What I'd like to see is thorough background investigations of the people who are pushing for these stupid laws be made very very public, such that they are properly exposed as frauds and sycophants.

[prayag]

Ok, I will play the devil's advocate here because someone has to. This has been going on since the pre-internet era. India unlike the US and like the UK doesn't have unlimited free speech and have fairly strong defamation and libel laws. This was a rich man's problem because how would you defame someone unless you have access to printing press or can go on radio and television. The internet changed all that. The government doesn't want it to change (for obvious reasons), hence all this hoopla.

Of course the free speech will win because it's almost impossible to censor the internet but the people in power will not go down without a fight.

[bad_user]

In case you are trying to give justifications for these requests because this has been going on since the pre-internet era, then don't - freedom of speech should be a fundamental right of all people.

[lisperforlife]

Sibal is an idiot. Nobody in India takes him seriously. When he is not busy kissing sonia and rahul's ass, he talks from his own.

[prayag]

I disagree. I think Sibal is one of the smarter and honest guy in the government. I do think people take him seriously. He is the person behind the $35 tablet, he is moving the country from an absolute points based system of grading to relative grade based system and is opening up more IITs. He has risen among the ranks in the government to Human Resources and Education Minister. You might not agree with what he does but I don't think you can take him trivially.

[ajays]

Have the Indian politicians learnt nothing from the events unfolding in the Middle-East this entire year? Or could it be that they _have_ seen the power of the 'net, and are scared? This (defamatory pages) could just be a ruse to assert control over the 'net, to prevent an Indian Jasmine Revolution.

[nekojima]

An 'Indian Jasmine Revolution' is highly unlikely in India because there are at least the relatively free-and-fair elections that are/were completely absent in Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Yemen....

There might be massive corruption in the main parties, nationally, regionally and locally, but there is at least something of a choice and a possible release for the pressure-valve of public opinion.

[madrik]

What is this? Watch your speech, because Big Sib has installed the Netpolice; that which does not ingratiate itself to the fancies of the power-mongers shall be expunged.

No service provider should bear, or provide any means to further, this idiocy.

[amritsharma]

"A man who answered the phone in Mr. Rai’s office said he did not talk to the press and hung up when a reporter asked for a press contact."

Wow.

[rohit89]

I'm constantly amazed at the cluelessness shown by officials. Sometimes I wonder if they're doing it just to troll us...

[teja1990]

Someone please remind Mr.Sibal that India is a democracy , one of the largest of its kind!!

[ww520]

Would Google pull out of India because of this?

[FameofLight]

No, they will never. Because its executive function to ask many things, but we have fairly independent judiciary that take of these non-sense things by executives.

[shareme]

Why is Indian govt afraid of its own citizens words?

[threepointone]

There is a cultural angle to this - Indian politicians (and even lots of jingoistic citizens) take insults to their honour/culture waaaay too seriously. That, and they're troglodytes who don't understand the Internet.

[kijin]

Every government is afraid of its own citizens' words. Some governments just react in stupider ways.

[tathagata]

Holy cow!!