Facebook And 11 Others Go On Trial Today | TechTree.com

Facebook And 11 Others Go On Trial Today

Social networking giant shrugs off responsibility for user-generated content.

 

Facebook, along with 11 other online services including Google's YouTube and Orkut are scheduled to face trial in India, because they failed to comply with the government's directive to pre-screen their content. These websites were expected to take down content that "seeks to create enmity, hatred, and deemed ethnically objectionable, grossly harmful, defamatory, or blasphemous", within 36 hours of being posted. FB and others are reported to have accepted the responsibility to remove such content, once they are notified. However, they have denied that they can be held liable for such content, as it is generated by users and they are unable to monitor such huge amounts of data.

Earlier, the government had assured that it will never enforce censorship on social media websites, but with a veiled warning that such websites must rather exercise self-censorship to avoid trouble. If today's ruling is decided against these web portals, then their officials could be possibly face jail time or be slapped with fines. It could even be ruled that the websites be banned or censored like in China, though India is unlikely to go to such extremes. FB and Google consider India an important market because of its huge online population, and it is only bound to grow with the increasing penetration of mobile internet. Today's ruling will therefore have huge implications for all social media websites as far as their revenue generation in India is concerned.


TAGS: Internet, Facebook, Jayesh

 
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