Sibal to meet executives of Goog,FB on guidelines of content

New Delhi, Dec 9: After facing severe criticism over his statement, Union Telecom minister Kapil Sibal on Friday announced that he would call for a roundtable on Dec 15 for evolving guidelines to block objectionable content on the social networking sites.

According to Sibal, this step has been taken after he found vulgar, demeaning and insulting content in these sites.

"It was not my intent ever to interfere with the social media. I wanted them to evolve their own guidelines. But if somebody throws up their hands, we will have to evolve some guidelines," Sibal said.

It is believed that senior representatives of Google and Facebook will attend the roundtable. Sibal did not mention the names of those who have been invited for the discussion.

"I wanted a solution, a dialogue with them and deal with this issue in a sensible responsible manner," said Sibal.

Sibal's call for censoring online content in social networking sites caused a wide uproar among netizens. Kapil said that he and his ministry had met the representatives several times but they failed to come up with their own guidelines.

"Orally, they agreed to do something, didn't agree with some other issues. But they did not commit on anything. On December 5, they threw up their hands saying 'we can't deal with any of this at our end and we will apply US community standards'," chided Sibal.

Reacting on Sibal's censorship, Google spokesperson said that there is a difference between what is controversial and what is illegal. Adding to his point, he said "when content is legal but controversial, we don't remove it because people's differing views should be respected, so long as they are legal."

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