Government Plans Meet to Chalk Out Strategy to Remove Hate Messages

The government is planning to convene a meeting of all stake-holders for this.

The meeting is being planned by the government in the wake of widespread use of social media platforms for circulation of hate messages, pictures, audios and videos with communal overtones and hate contents in recent past, especially after the Dadri incident where a Muslim man was lynched over rumours of cow slaughter.

Representatives of the Ministries of Home, Telecommunication, Intelligence Bureau, NTRO, Facebook, Twitter etc., will deliberate and chalk out strategy to check the growing menace.

"We will suggest that objectionable contents with hate messages, especially those having communal overtones, which vitiate the society should be removed from the social media platforms," a senior government official said.

During the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in UP, security agencies had blamed hate messages spread through social media platforms as the cause of heightened tension among communities.

Rumours spread through social media had caused panic among people from the Northeastern region living in Bangalore and its neighbouring cities, leading to mass exodus in 2012.

Referring to the fake video that was allegedly used to fan Muzaffarnagar riots, the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said at a meeting of National Integration Council on September 23, 2013: "We must find a way to stop misuse of social media".

"We cannot let anti-national forces misuse social media.

Social media is about expressing opinions freely and we need to maintain that sense of freedom," Singh had said.

The then Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde had said that government was "eager to ban social media but it is not easy".

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a frequent user of Twitter.