| Friends, Regarding the role of Facebook, a few questions have been raised how Facebook is responsible for whatever happened on one of its groups. These people need to understand that responsibility goes hand in hand with any kind of power, activity and purpose. Facebook and all these social networking sites are providing space for networking and interaction and also for expression of thoughts. These are powerful sites where millions of people converge to exchange thoughts and expressions. This means that anything said on these sites are able to get communicated to a very large number of people. At times they are able to deeply affect the hearts and minds of people. In fact, these social sites have been an extended part of our entity. There are many people who live a large part of their lives in this virtual world. Everyone knows how Obama used Facebook to his advantage in his initial days of Presidential runs. This being so, all such networking sites also need to take responsibility for whatever content are being generated on them. If they have provided a platform, they need to take vigil of whatever is taking place on them. If one opens a discotheque, the person will also need to see that such acts like open sex or women harassment don't take place openly in these places. Same would be true for any such service provider. In the case of Facebook, they have created and provided an extremely powerful site for people to converge and express themselves. Hence they do need to have mechanisms where any kind of misuse, criminal acts and other perverse acts are immediately taken care of. Sadly here these people are being completely oblivious of this responsibility. Earning money is good but it can't be completely taken away from its legal and social responsibilities. I communicated with Facebook in all possible ways available on the site to present my objection about the contents on this group. But I got no satisfactory response from them. In fact, the response I got was highly evasive and irresponsible. Words are more hurtful than deeds and hence a site like Facebook needs to keep highly effective mechanisms to immediately respond to any complaint of serious nature. They can't say that they are not responsible for anything being written on its platform, particularly when they are being clearly intimated. This is nothing but sheer irresponsibility and is also fundamentally illegal. It is akin to a service platform being provided in physical world, with no inn-keeper or persons keeping the required order there. In all such circumstances, there would be nothing but complete chaos. Thus, at least from now onwards, we need to devise means and exert pressure on these social sites that they enforce suitable grievance redressal mechanism which immediately respond to the complaints that are presented to them, and take suitable measures on all these complaints.
Amitabh Thakur |
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