Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Micro-blogging site Twitter on Wednesday responded to the Centres request to weed out offensive tweets and promised to cooperate in locating and removing unlawful content,five days after the government got in touch with the US firm as part of its efforts to curb communal tension in some parts of the country following the ethnic clashes in Assam.
Twitter has also agreed to address the concerns of the Prime Ministers Office which had repeatedly flagged several accounts tweeting objectionable content in the name of the Prime Minister. Government sources said that Twitter had not responded to the PMOs complaints first made in June about such accounts,forcing the government to block their IP addresses. But some of these accounts had resurfaced by using different IP addresses.
The government had written to Twitter last week seeking information about some tweets considered offensive and inflammatory and posted with the objective of fanning communal hatred.
Similar requests were made to Google and Facebook,both of which provided some information,leading to a large number of web pages being blocked. While Google and Facebook have offices in India,Twitter does not and is headquartered in San Francisco.
In its response,Twitter said the Indian governments request had not followed proper procedure because of which it was unable to respond earlier. It would now actively review the current requests and will seek additional information from the Department of Information Technology to locate unlawful content and tweets that it (DIT) likes us to address,it said.
