Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi on Wednesday criticised social media company Twitter for failing to remove abusive posts threatening women, The Hindu reported.
The minister raised the matter at a round-table conference on cyber crimes against women and children. Representatives from Twitter, Facebook, United Nations Children’s Fund, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the National Association of Software and Services Companies attended the meeting.
“I have suggested to Twitter that it should draw up a list of violent words and devise a way so that posts containing them can be pulled down,” Gandhi told reporters.
A number of women have received death and rape threats on Twitter. Last month, the Office of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner asked the government to protect journalist Rana Ayyub after she received death threats following an online hate campaign.
“We have taken major systemic steps to improve Twitter for everyone,” a spokesperson for Twitter told The Hindu. “We have made more than 30 changes to our products, policies, and processes in the past 16 months to tackle safety, and as of April 2018, we are taking action on four times the number of abusive accounts every day compared to the same time last year.”
Meanwhile, Gandhi on Wednesday said her ministry could fund training to create experts who would work in the Home ministry’s special anti-child pornography unit. “There will be two kinds of trainings – one would be for specialists and the second would be for Station House Officer and police officer training,” she said.
The minister also announced that the Home ministry would soon establish a hotline where people can flag websites carrying sexually explicit images and videos of women and children. While her ministry said it could be set up in three months, participants at the conference felt it would take longer because a framework needs to be put in place, laws need to be amended and analysts need to be trained, The Hindu reported.
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