Indian Union Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal has asked the various web companies and Social networking websites to prescreen user content from India before putting it up online. This has come in the wake of some social networking sites carrying defamatory content about Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The Minister held a meeting with top officials of the Indian units of Yahoo, Facebook, Google and Microsoft and asked them to devise a mechanism where their staff would screen and filter and check for defamatory content before uploading any content online. Indian IT Minister Kapil Sibal showed them a website that was posted in the name of a religious site but which turned out to be a pornographic site. Kapil Sibal also said that for security reasons the Indian Intelligent Agencies would also want to monitor these websites and Social Networks.

Continue reading →