· 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.
· 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.”
· 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.
· The on going proceedings in the matter started after Supreme Court took suo moto note of a letter by a NGO on rampant circulation of sexual abuse videos.
· The source said that government has compiled a keyword repository of over 500 English and Hindi words. These have been shared with the intermediaries so that they can issue warning message for searching about child pornography or rape and gang rape videos.
· On earlier instruction to set up an easy reporting mechanism for public on their platform, “Facebook has complied partially, while Whatsapp and Twitter are yet to comply.”
Source : The Hindu