Under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, the government blocked more than 9,800 URLs, accounts and web pages in 2020, an increase of nearly 170% from 2019.
In a written reply in the Lok Sabha, Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, wherever the situation warrants, under the provision of Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, the government prohibits illegal and malicious online content in the interest of sovereignty, and To prevent the integrity of India, the defense of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or the commission of any cognizable offense related to the above.
It added under this provision, 9,849 URLs / accounts / web pages were blocked in 2020, up from 3,603 URLs / accounts / web pages in 2019; There are 2,799 such URLs in 2018 and 1,385 URLs in 2017.
In a separate reply, the minister said that in the year 2020, around 1,717 URLs were blocked on Facebook and 2,731 URLs on Twitter. The number of blocked URLs for Facebook was 357, 526, 155, 2,049 for the years 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively. Similarly, for Twitter, 194 URLs were blocked in 2016, 103 in 2017, 224 in 2018 and 1,041 in 2019.
“Blocking is done as per the procedure in Information Technology (Procedure for Public Access by Information and Blocking for Security Measures) Rules, 2009”.
“As an inter-ministerial committee, these rules prescribe adequate safeguards and checks and balances, with members as joint secretaries or equivalent to examine and recommend the blocking request,” he said. .
The minister said that cyberspace is a complex environment of people, software, hardware and services on the Internet that offers the possibility of instant communication by anyone around the world. The global outreach of social media platforms has grown significantly to allow interaction between Internet users to share, host, store, broadcast user content, and due to such features, in particular anonymity Alternative to, there are some naughty social media platforms that use hateful and divisive language.
.
Leave a Reply