While social media brings the world a cog closer all together, it also carries an ugly side. At any given time, there is a plethora of hateful and inappropriate content on any given social media interaction, in terms of just about any section of content. In recent cases, there have been several instances of accounts peddling propaganda without any virtual checks that verify the information, hence giving the perpetuators a free-hand.
While every social media claims to be either working or possessing a sort of solution for dealing articles of such inappropriate content, not one of the lot has actually proven to be successful at its fight. The most recent case comes from the riots happening in India, particularly in the country’s capital, New Delhi. While communal riots have taken place all around the country regarding a citizenship law, not one place has seen the situation take a turn for the worse than it has in Delhi.
With the amount of content that has been peddled into the collective media outlets of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube, the Home Ministry of India has asked the following outlets to curb the flow of inappropriate content. Twitter has effectively tackled the flow of fake content by preventing effective hashtags from trending.
“We swiftly took down content and accounts that violated our rules, including dehumanizing language and material that could trigger offline harm,” a Twitter spokesperson said in response to the queries.“Twitter is the only uniquely open service where inaccurate content was also debunked in real-time by people, including law enforcement, trusted journalists and news media organizations which helped protect the public or teams were and continue to take action judiciously, consistently and impartially on any content that violates our policies,” the person said.
YouTube has reportedly begun removing videos from its website that have been flagged by the authorities instantly. At the time of writing, Facebook and WhatsApp did not respond to the methods that they are deploying to tackle the said issues, however, the records of both these companies rather show a loose-hand when it comes to dealing with situations like these.