Technology News Desk !!! Faced with a massive controversy over the spread of child pornography on its platform in India, Twitter on Saturday said it has banned child sex abuse, unconsensual nudity and related content promotion in the country on July 26 and August 25. Between 57,643 accounts have been banned. Earlier this week, Delhi Commission for Women chairperson Swati Maliwal had said that the responses received from Twitter on child pornography complaints were incomplete and the commission was not satisfied with them. Maliwal had on September 20 summoned the Twitter India Policy Head and Delhi Police over tweets showing child pornography and rape videos of women and children on the micro-blogging platform. Taking suo motu cognizance of several tweets that openly depicted videos and pictures of sexual acts involving children, the commission said that most of the tweets depicted children completely naked and many of them included children and women. Along with brutal rape and other non-consensual sexual activities are also depicted. Twitter, in its monthly report on compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021, also said that it received 1,088 complaints from users in India in the same time-frame through its grievance redressal mechanism. Acting on the complaints, the company took action against 41 URLs.
In addition, we processed 76 complaints appealing for Twitter account suspension. All these were resolved and appropriate responses were sent. We did not revoke the suspension of any of these accounts after reviewing the specifics of the situation. During this reporting period, Twitter also received 15 requests related to general questions about accounts.
The company said it does not promote any material that promotes child sexual abuse – whether in direct messages or elsewhere throughout the service. In India, users reported the most about online abuse and harassment (544) and hateful conduct (502), among other categories. Meanwhile, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk expressed serious concern over reports this week about the presence of tweets soliciting child pornography on Twitter. Responding to a report about how major advertising brands have withdrawn from Twitter after their promotional posts appeared alongside child porn tweets, Musk said: “Extremely worrying.”
–IANS
RHA/ANM