Government aims to launch the portal in three months to flag and remove offensive content.
New Delhi: The Modi government is all set to launch a portal it hopes will serve as a single online weapon to fight child pornography and rape videos and images and block their circulation in real time.
The decision to tackle such cybercrime was taken at a closed-door meeting organised by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) and chaired by its minister Maneka Gandhi.
The portal, which will be launched by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), hopes to be ready and functioning in the next three months, a WCD official, who did not wish to be named, said.
The portal will initially be a complaint-based one, in that, the blocking process would be initiated only after a complaint regarding offensive content is made. It will gradually be made into a reporting one, where an individual will be able to flag offensive content by reporting the link to the portal.
The Centre hopes that eventually the portal will be developed in a way that it will be able detect offensive content on its own, and initiate an automated blocking process.
“The idea is to ensure that anyone who is harassed need not go through the process of law,” the official said, adding that this is to ensure that complainants don’t have to go through a prolonged process.
Not changing laws
The ministry, the official said, was not seeking to change existing laws that govern pornography but was only looking to target illegal content online, such as videos of rape, gang rape, revenge porn and child pornography.
The official added that the government will need to build an international alliance to fight the problem as a large chunk of such content is from international sources.
Of the various alliances, the alliance with Canada’s Arachnid – an automated crawler to reduce the online availability of child sexual abuse videos – would be the most tricky and radical, since it will allow crawlers to proactively search for offensive content. The mechanisms to work this out in a manner that not too many Indian networks are opened up to crawlers will need to be figured out to protect privacy, the official said.
Then there is the issue of such content being circulated through messaging apps such as WhatsApp. While Maneka Gandhi is not inclined to push for de-encryption of WhatsApp content, since it may also be a privacy issue, consultations with Facebook, which now owns the messaging service, are being held to figure out a mechanism for content shared through it.
WCD to fund portal
The portal will funded by the WCD. In the stakeholders’ discussion chaired by Gandhi, apart from various government departments such as MHA, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the CBI and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights among others, representatives from social media agencies including Twitter and Facebook were also present.
Last year, the Supreme Court had also weighed in on the issue and directed that a panel constituted by representatives from the home ministry and IT ministry and from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, be formed to stop the circulation gang rape videos.
First take action against sites like xhamster and xvideos for showing millions of Indian revenge porn videos. Plus arrest all the people in India sharing these videos at one go like demonetization. Only Modi sarkar can do it. Make the world safe for everyone. Beti bachao.
Jai Hind