Students at Jawaharlal Nehru University have demanded an inquiry into complaints that YouTube channels of several news websites were blocked for a day on the campus Wi-Fi, before being restored on Saturday night.
Earlier on Saturday, the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union had claimed that students were not able to access certain YouTube channels. University officials had denied the claim.
“Access has been blocked to news sites of NDTV, The Wire, etc,” the students’ union president Geeta Kumari had told the Hindustan Times before the access was restored. “We are redirected to a page that says we are trying to access ‘adult content’. We cannot even access YouTube videos of previous presidential debates at JNU.” The restrictions were first observed on Friday, Kumari said.
Student activist Shehla Rashid alleged on Twitter that the Vice Chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar had “censored” the Wi-Fi. Kumar, however, retweeted a post by a university rector, saying that there had been no change in the website access policy on campus.
Rashid also claimed that searches for keywords including her name and the names of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, former Jawaharlal Nehru University Student’s Union President Kanhaiya Kumar had also been censored.
A video uploaded online showed students were getting the “restricted mode” message when they tried to access certain channels. The message said: “Some results have been removed because Restricted Mode is enabled by your network administrator”.
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