Indian Minister Wants Web Companies To Self-Censor User Content

Another day, another government trying to figure out how to censor the internet. This time it's India, where acting communications minister Kapil Sibal is meeting with officials from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook to pressure them to self-censor user content, the New York Times reports. The issue is that someone wrote something mean about a politician, Sonia Ghandi, on her Facebook page. That's right. While other countries come up with broader excuses for trying to interfere with what people can post online -- China says it's trying to stop porn, the US says it's trying to protect copyright holders -- Sibal is openly just upset about politicians being criticized.?His solution, the report says, is to have web companies use humans to monitor and delete objectionable content before it gets posted. Since TechCrunch has lots of readers in India, and uses Facebook for comments, I guess this means Facebook would be required to decide what comments people in the country are allowed to post here? Or would TechCrunch get blocked like it is in China if there are any comments by anyone that are negative about Indian politicians? Hard to say at this point. Sibal's effort isn't a law.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/DrkCc21tZXU/

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