An Indian court on Friday issued a summons to 21 websites including social networking website Facebook, search giant Google, Yahoo, video-sharing website YouTube to stand trial for allegedly publishing ‘objectionable contents.’
And, the court asked Social Media sites to remove derogatory content by February 6, 2012.
The websites will face contempt charges in case they fail to remove all objectionable content by February 6.
The court is acting in response to images of religious figures which are deemed to be “unacceptable to national standards”
A statement from civil judge Mukesh Kumar explains the complaint in more detail:
Contents which are uploaded by some miscreants through these social media sites are highly unacceptable and are inflammatory and derogatory which cannot be accepted by any religion.
The court’s order comes three days after another Delhi court hearing a petition had asked various social networking companies including Facebook, Google and YouTube to remove objectionable content promoting hatred or communal disharmony from their respective websites.
Few weeks back Indian Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal has informed that India is planning to regulate the Social Media sites.
Google, Facebook and others have already publicly spoken of their commitment to removing unsavoury content, but using their own standards and methods.
Google says,
We work really hard to make sure that people have as much access to information as possible, while also following the law. This means that when content is illegal, we abide by local law and take it down.
And even where content is legal but breaks or violates our own terms and conditions we take that down too, once we have been notified about it, but when content is legal and does not violate our policies, we will not remove it just because it is controversial, as we believe that people’s differing views, so long as they are legal, should be respected and protected.
India has about 100 million internet users, the third-largest number after China and the United States.
