Highlights
- Finding the efforts by Internet giants to curb circulation of online videos of sexual violence against women and children inadequate, the government is likely to seek “stricter directions” to service providers, such as Facebook and YouTube, from the Supreme Court.
- The directions sought will include considerably reducing the time taken by the intermediary to comply with content removal requests under certain Sections of the IT Act to less than 10 hours from about 36 hours at present.
Monitoring tools
- The government also wants that the service providers be asked to employ agencies for identification and removal of sexually violent content, particularly videos relating to child pornography and rape, besides deploying “proactive monitoring tools.”
- This was discussed during a high-level meeting earlier this week to firm up recommendations on removal of sexually violent content, particularly videos relating to child pornography and rape.
- The meeting, chaired by Home Minister Rajnath Singh, was attended by Electronics and IT and Law and Justice Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Director of the Intelligence Bureau Rajiv Jain.
Tracking the origin
- During the meeting, while evaluating the progress on previous Supreme Court orders in this regard, it was found that the compliance by the service providers was mediocre.
- Additionally, the government is also keen on intermediaries sharing certain data with law enforcement agencies to identify the origin of such content.
- The issue of tracing the origin of “unlawful” content is already a bone of contention between the government and WhatsApp, which was recently pulled up by the Centre after being misused to spread fake news.
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