Following a complaint from the National Commission for the Protection of Children’s Rights (NCPCR), the Delhi Police lodged an FIR for allegedly allowing access to child pornography. The micro-blogging platform on Wednesday said it has a zero-tolerance policy for Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE). The California-based company said that it will continue to engage with law enforcement agencies and NGO partners in India to combat the issue while declaring that the Platform will continue ‘invest in proactive content detection and removal’ of content that violates the rules.
“We use PhotoDNA technology, our own proprietary tools, and other systems to detect behavioural signals and remove media; which also, in many cases, helps us remove new accounts linked to this type of content before they have even sent their first Tweet,” the microblogging platform’s spokesperson explained about the tech behind content detection and removal.
The case was lodged in accordance with the applicable sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the POCSO Act, and the IT Act. Priyank Kanoongo, Chairperson of NCPCR, registered the complaint, saying that it was found that “the toolkit for deep and dark web” was accessible on Twitter as well. This enables access to Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) for everyone, including children. This is the fourth FIR lodged against Twitter in India since it lost its precious “safe harbor” protection.
The Twitter India Managing Director has also been directed by the National Commission for Women (NCW), to remove all pornographic and obscene content from the platform in a week. The Chairperson of the NCW, Rekha Sharma, also wrote to the Police Commissioner of Delhi to investigate the case and to take necessary legal action. The Commission had previously received a similar complaint and notified Twitter of this situation for immediate action. Unfortunately, the micro-blogging platform appears to have taken no action, according to the NCW.
Just to recap Twitter has been in the limelight in the country as multiple FIRs in numerous incidents have been registered. On Monday, an FIR was registered against Twitter India Managing Director Manish Maheshwar for the distorted map of India. Prior to that, another complaint was registered against Twitter in connection with the Ghaziabad fake video, in which an elderly man was attacked and an element of communalism was maliciously added into an already shocking incident. The worst among all is that Twitter’s ‘safe harbor’ status in India had been revoked due to its failure to obey IT rules.
