Sibal tells internet cos to screen content

India’s telecom minister, Kapil Sibal, met representatives from internet companies and social media websites today — including those from Google, Facebook and Yahoo! — asking them to prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online, The New York Times reports. “About six weeks ago, Mr. Sibal called legal representatives from the top Internet service providers and Facebook into his New Delhi office, said one of the executives who was briefed on the meeting. 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,” the New York Times report read. [caption id=“attachment_148615” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Flickr Commons”]  [/caption] The demand to monitor content comes nearly a year after the government issued new guidelines to regulate information flow on the internet. The guidelines —  Information Technology (Intermediaries guidelines) Rules, 2011 — were termed by internet freedom advocates as repressive and a threat to freedom on the internet. One of the rules require that intermediaries, who include websites like YouTube and Facebook and companies that host Web sites, remove offensive content within 36 hours. Read the full story here.