In a bid to curb child pornography, the Supreme Court has constituted a committee comprising representatives from the Union government and internet giants to explore a technical solution to block videos of sexual offences on social media.
A bench comprising Justices MB Lokur and UU Lalit gave the nominees of Google India, Microsoft India, Yahoo India, Facebook and other internet intermediaries 15 days to meet and come up with a solution. The apex court also asked the representatives of all the stakeholders to participate in the meetings and inform it about the outcome on April 20, the next date of hearing.
The top court also turned down the plea of Facebook and Google which contended that their representative would not be able to attend meeting for 15 days and they should be allowed to participate through video-conferencing.
The court told the companies to not treat India as their colony and if they were serious about the problem then they should send their representatives to India. All the four companies furnished names of their representatives who will participate in the meeting of the committee which would also comprise of two senior officials of home ministry and advocate Aparna Bhatt.
The Supreme Court passed the order on a petition filed by an NGO. In the petition, the NGO had asked the court to to direct the search engines and social networking sites not to allow uploading of offensive video on their platforms.
The Centre had earlier informed the Supreme Court that it would set up a specialised agency to block and curb sharing of sexual offence videos on social networking platforms. However, it had also expressed its inability to trace the source of objectionable video if it is uploaded through mobile phones and shared through ‘WhatsApp’.
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