Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Govt Petition against an Orkut Community


I am regular user of Orkut, a great networking site, which is now run by Google(taken over). Orkut allows people to create different communities and have some common discussions among people.

As this is an un-managed commiunity, with time there have been several 'displeasing and 'hurting' communties as well that have formed.
Ofcourse 'displeasing' and 'hurting' are relative terms . What might be displeasing to me, may not be for someone else.

Same is the case of the community 'We hate India' in orkut, which has a group of Pakistanis in it.
The news is that Mumbai Hight court/Maharashtra Govt has issued a notice to google for spreading hatred about India by it's social networking service.

Actually there are several such groups in Orkut which are anti-india, but i am not sure how the Govt pin pointed this group alone.
The main reason could be that this shows a picture of our national flag being burnt.

In general I feel the Govt should not interfere too much in such open communities and stop people from expressing their ideas. At this same time, in this specific scenario i am happy that this happened.
Because the lazy Orkut Administrators needed this shock. The orkut site provides with an option called 'Report as Bogus' where in people can complain against a specific community, if it's hurting sentiments of the people. This is as shown in pic above

And i have seen that there has been many and many discussions among people on this community 'We hate India' and many of us compained as well.
But Orkut did not take any corrective action. If they had taken the right action , at the right time then they could have avoided this court case.
So i think this petition would make the orkut administrators more smarter and act on complaints of the users more quickly.

But what's surprising me is that the specific community still exists now. I expected Google to act immediately and remove it temporarily atleast.

But as far as the Govt is concerned, I think it's better it interferes Only when sites like Orkut do not take any action inspite of people's complaints (like this case) only. Except in such cases, it's better Govt doesn't interfere in things like this and let it be managed by people themselves. The simple reason being there is no limit to screening the internet and Govt will only complicate things.

The funny part here is...the petition says that the government should "appoint a 'controller' under the Information Technology Act-2000 to regulate all such communities being in operation on the internet.
"Hahaha. I just can't imagine the plight of the person who would be doing this crazy job.

Btw...I think our High court. doesn't know one thing. People can join Orkut only on invitation, not by creating an account for themselves like any other site.Now who will invite these 'Controllers' into Orkut ;)



5 comments:

healthedu said...

yes.. ur right
orkut admin ppl must be alert

senthil kumar dhanasekaran said...

every where there will be ppl who miss use.. we just need to ignore them.. i guess the govt has more important job on hand to erradicate poverty, strengthen infrastructure, and so on.. wish they could concentrate on them and then come n handle these jobs..

Indian Blogger said...

Orkut was always owned by Google.
It was the brainchild of one of the employees there (Orkut) who made it for internal purpose. It became a hit and is popular now.There are no means to generate revenue yet from it.

Anil Kurnool said...

Well, how long can you look around for psychologicial insurgents.

There is a difference between physical and psychological warfares.

We need to know, how to control or curb that, not using Judiciary for everything.

Ankit Tandon said...

I am an indian .. but do believe that if anyone in this world wants to protest about anyone be it my motherland itself ...then he has everyright to.This is what i call freedom ...You can love the one you want and you can hate the one you want.The Indian govt. approach i thought was narrow minded.That small idiotic community was no way harming us as a country .There are always a bunch of people who hate a particular country.This is ofcourse just an personnel opinion