India Asks Google, Facebook to Screen User Content | Hacker News Reader

India Asks Google, Facebook to Screen User Content

india.blogs.nytimes.com

81 pointsnarad58 comments

Ridiculous - "At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi. “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites."

I'm not allowed to criticize my government in a public forum? Pardon my language, but this is fucking ridiculous.

Haa. Sonia Gandhi is not technically part of the government. But of course she is more powerful than the government.

What? She is an elected member of parliament. She is in every way a part of the government. Her role is not reflective of the power she yields but that is a separate issue.

An elected member of parliament is not a member of government in India, and I guess, everywhere else. Legislature and executive are two separate parts of a democracy.

> Mr. Sibal

> fucking ridiculous.

"Sibal" actually means "fucking" in Korean. Coincidence?

I wish he knew that ;)

Not an unusual request considering the utter cluelessness and Sycophantic bootlicking of the people involved. Consider that the perceived slight is to the defacto head of India - Sonia Gandhi (a person with terrifying power but Zero accountability, completely outside the Govt.) this is being held up as the reason to institute an Orwellian nightmare of Censorship. A reasonable response is FU in nice terms.

[EDIT - minor spelling]

Sonia Gandhi is an MP, she is not "completely outside the government". A few people have said this now, where is this talk coming from?

Right, she is an MP that has more power than the PM.

The misinformation comes from the RSS propaganda machine. Irony, they are way too active on FB.

edit: missed a word

Source?

Just. Wow. Mind boggling amounts of stupidity.

"In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said.

The three executives said Mr. Sibal has told these companies that he expects them to set up a proactive prescreening system, with staffers looking for objectionable content and deleting it before it is posted."

It is funny how much people who don't contribute to the world think they get to tell other people what to do.

Lamar Smith, one of the sponsors of SOPA, told Google something similar. That it should be possible for Google to hire some high-school kids to keep piracy under control on their search engine.

I agree. As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand on some things, she certainly disliked uselessness as much as I do. I can't help but wonder if certain aspects of her future's government in Atlas Shrugged is the natural end stage of a government.

I wish if Google and FB said, " Sorry Sibal we don't censor results , if u insist we would leave!" Though its not viable , it will scare the politicians.

You don't have to be a fan of miss rand to believe that politicians shouldn't live high while the people who make their food suffer.

Oh, so they are simply working on fixing unemployment problem in India! :)

Maybe they actually think it's realistic to hire a couple of million people to screen online content. After all, they have more than a billion people, and they also have extensive experience with their outsourced call centers.

You do realize that not all of India, especially its politicians, are involved in call center activities, correct? I hope you also realize that life in India doesn't revolve around call centers, even though that's the most contact with India many westerners have.

Of course I understand that call centers make up only a tiny part of the Indian economy. But I can certainly imagine these politicians thinking, "Wouldn't it be really easy for Google and Facebook to hire a few thousand people here in India (who know the language, culture, etc.) to monitor the web in real time?" Hiring human censors would be completely unrealistic in countries like the United States, but maybe it doesn't sound so far-fetched in countries with low wages and a large population.

Do you understand that a country with a large population will also have a large amount of user-generated content? It is not people with low wages, but court of law which should have the power to decide what content is inflammatory. The meaning of freedom and democracy doesn't vary with amount of population.

> It is not people with low wages, but court of law which should have the power to decide what content is inflammatory

I completely agree with you. It's Mr. Sibal who seems to think that human censors are not only a good idea but also realistic.

This seems to be a fairly reoccurring theme - countries requesting internet sites to mass censor user content. Rarely though do they understand the scale of what that means. In the article, it stated that they wanted each item to be screened by a human. In the same way that I'll quote a client a much larger price if they want IE6 support, I often don't see why these companies don't just quote the country a price for the manpower required to do this. Kind of a, "Listen, pay us X per year to hire people to do this. Otherwise, it's simply impossible for us to do, and we'll fight your request in court til the end of time." While I doubt any country would actually pay, I think it would serve to at least educate the politicians as to how much work censoring the internet actually requires.

The request itself may be clueless, however you can easily mass censor content that contains certain keywords.

It can get pretty effective too, as is the case with spam filtering. You could even detect the tone of the article - if it's a positive or a negative one. Plus you can hellban the users too and they won't notice the censorship until much later.

So I don't get what a discussion of costs will bring, as there's always a cheaper way. Freedom of speech is the issue here, not cost.

"The request itself may be clueless, however you can easily mass censor content that contains certain keywords."

Then you get ridiculous situations for mass banned keywords like recently in Pakistan or for a long time in China, most recently 'jasmine tea' was banned. China arguably has the most 'sophisticated' censorship system in the world, with over a million staff policing internet content & developing systems to monitor content, but it is still noticeable to users. So your theory that it can be implemented without notice is largely false.

Its also quite easy to get around most keywords by using slang or alternatives for political leaders, such as 'The Old Man' (usually negative) for Robert Mugabe, 'Mr Bow Tie' (sarcastic, negative) for HK CE Donald Tsang or 'The Lady' (positive) for Aung San Suu Kyi. Using single initials is also popular.

I've lived in several dictatorships & the ingenuity of anti-censorship can be quite simple to overcome complex systems.

This is what you get when you seriously consider making SOPA into law: "If you can get companies to strangle funds and kidnap domains of people saying that, can't you not also make this disappear?"

Freedom of speech was the one advantage we had over other developing countries. I guess the Indian Gov was scared by the support the anti corruption movement got online.

I'd like it if the companies asked to do this just pulled out of the country altogether. "Can't deal with the fundamental nature of the internet? No internet, then." It's needlessly vindictive on my part, but we've seen this story play out again and again. That's not how it works!

The problem with what you suggest (ignoring the vindictiveness), is that the people pushing for these asinine rules would benefit from the consequences of the loss of the internet while the masses would instead be harmed.

What I'd like to see is thorough background investigations of the people who are pushing for these stupid laws be made very very public, such that they are properly exposed as frauds and sycophants.

Ok, I will play the devil's advocate here because someone has to. This has been going on since the pre-internet era. India unlike the US and like the UK doesn't have unlimited free speech and have fairly strong defamation and libel laws. This was a rich man's problem because how would you defame someone unless you have access to printing press or can go on radio and television. The internet changed all that. The government doesn't want it to change (for obvious reasons), hence all this hoopla.

Of course the free speech will win because it's almost impossible to censor the internet but the people in power will not go down without a fight.

In case you are trying to give justifications for these requests because this has been going on since the pre-internet era, then don't - freedom of speech should be a fundamental right of all people.

I am justifying anything. I am telling it how it. People in the US think of freedom of speech as a fundamental right which it should be. This is not the case with most other countries. It's the same as people in other countries thinking that universal healthcare should be a fundamental right, many people in the US don't agree.

I personally am in favor of both being fundamental rights.

I'm NOT from the US, I'm from an ex-Communist Eastern Europe country.

Universal healthcare involves government spending. We do have it were I live, however it's not working out because of a lack of funds. So the medical personnel takes bribery to do their job, otherwise receiving proper care is like winning the lottery. IMHO, universal healthcare is nice to have, however it's not on the same level as freedom of speech.

Nothing else is as important as freedom of speech. Why? Because by having freedom of speech, then the people can make informed decisions regarding their future and the future of their children. And only by having freedom of speech you can then hope for a corruption-free government, that maybe will give you proper universal healthcare when they'll be able to afford it.

@prayag : Right to Freedom of Speech is a legally enforceable Fundamental Right in India. Are we talking about different Indias ?

Nope. We are talking about the same India. I don't know if you have actually read the Constitution of India but the right to expression in India comes with riders. From the Constitution of India Part III Section 19.

This is the foot-note about the Right of Expression: "Nothing in sub-clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub-clause in the interests of 4[the sovereignty and integrity of India,] the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.]"

Sibal is an idiot. Nobody in India takes him seriously. When he is not busy kissing sonia and rahul's ass, he talks from his own.

I disagree. I think Sibal is one of the smarter and honest guy in the government. I do think people take him seriously. He is the person behind the $35 tablet, he is moving the country from an absolute points based system of grading to relative grade based system and is opening up more IITs. He has risen among the ranks in the government to Human Resources and Education Minister. You might not agree with what he does but I don't think you can take him trivially.

Yes,I agree. The way he has managed his sector is brilliant.Last month I went to 'panchayat samiti' at taluka level and shocked to see that people were using UNIX and tablet Pc for their daily work.They sure have come long way.

May be he is smarter than the other utter idiots around him but he is still an idiot nevertheless. https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23IdiotKapilSibal

Have the Indian politicians learnt nothing from the events unfolding in the Middle-East this entire year? Or could it be that they _have_ seen the power of the 'net, and are scared? This (defamatory pages) could just be a ruse to assert control over the 'net, to prevent an Indian Jasmine Revolution.

An 'Indian Jasmine Revolution' is highly unlikely in India because there are at least the relatively free-and-fair elections that are/were completely absent in Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Yemen....

There might be massive corruption in the main parties, nationally, regionally and locally, but there is at least something of a choice and a possible release for the pressure-valve of public opinion.

What is this? Watch your speech, because Big Sib has installed the Netpolice; that which does not ingratiate itself to the fancies of the power-mongers shall be expunged.

No service provider should bear, or provide any means to further, this idiocy.

"A man who answered the phone in Mr. Rai’s office said he did not talk to the press and hung up when a reporter asked for a press contact."

Wow.

I'm constantly amazed at the cluelessness shown by officials. Sometimes I wonder if they're doing it just to troll us...

Someone please remind Mr.Sibal that India is a democracy , one of the largest of its kind!!

Would Google pull out of India because of this?

No, they will never. Because its executive function to ask many things, but we have fairly independent judiciary that take of these non-sense things by executives.

Why is Indian govt afraid of its own citizens words?

There is a cultural angle to this - Indian politicians (and even lots of jingoistic citizens) take insults to their honour/culture waaaay too seriously. That, and they're troglodytes who don't understand the Internet.

This I don't understand. Most of the Chinese and Indian politicians have STEM backgrounds. In theory, they are supposed to be very smart and critical thinkers. I find it hard to believe that someone that believes in the theory of evolution and the laws of thermodynamics doesn't have the same regard for freedom of expression or the cost of the human life.

Most of the Chinese and Indian politicians have STEM backgrounds.

To the contrary. Most Indian politicians are battle-tested veterans of university student unions (the "youth" wings of major political parties). They spent their university years running political campaigns, fighting the other unions, general thuggery, etc. In other words, they are the muscle of the political parties. After graduation (a term used lightly), they move on to the parent parties and rise up through the ranks. The rise is mostly determined by 2 major factors: your pedigree (as in who's kid & grandkid are you), as well as sycophancy (the more outlandish your slavish behavior, the faster your rise).

The fraction of politicians with a STEM background would be about 0.001%, if not less.

Can you explain what STEM background means? Most politicians in India are uneducated. Of course the ones at the national level are educated but by and large they are think only save their seats and get reelected, nothing beyond that.

Science, Technology, Engineering, Math.

Having a STEM background doesn't mean they aren't pig ignorant, it just means ...

Well, to be honest, it probably doesn't mean anything other than they were capable of passing a test.

Where did you get this glorious idea from, about Indian politicians? Half of the parliament probably never finished high school.

Some CNN, I believe, news report comparing American politicians to Indian, Asian, and European politicians. Basically, Asian leadership were engineers and scientists so have a GTD attitude to policy. Which is contrasted to American politicians who come from all types of backgrounds, but the most powerful person in the room might not be the brightest.

And if you've been following the GOP debates lately you can see our leadership act like complete buffoons.

Every government is afraid of its own citizens' words. Some governments just react in stupider ways.

Holy cow!!

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