Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

With a rapid jump in the number of crimes which are a result of the fake news spread through social media sites, Supreme Court slams the search engines–Google and Yahoo and social networking sites– Facebook and WhatsApp for promoting “objectionable material”.

On Friday, a bench constituting of Justices Madan B. Lokur and Deepak Gupta gave a deadline of one month to social networking sites in order to prevent uploading of objectionable content like child pornography, gang rapes and so on, on these sites. The bench has also warned to impose a Rs five lakh fine every day till Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, Microsoft and Yahoo, ensure a ‘foolproof mechanism’ to prevent such reprehensible content from getting uploaded.

The court was hearing a PIL filed by NGO Prajwala asking the court to order the sites and engines to prevent the upload of the objectionable content.

A very angry bench told the advocates representing social media sites, “What type of attitude you (social media sites) are all adopting? There is so much objectionable material on the social media sites. People are being lynched across the country, people are dying in various places, but you seem to be not bothered.”

The bench added, “You are saying that as long as it does not happen to me, it is ok. When it happens to me, then we will look into it.”

After the incidents of mob lynching occurred due to fake news spread through WhatsApp forward, the site came with new measures and restricted the forwards to five as well as highlighting the forwards.

By isha

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