Only after the orders from the Supreme Court of India, Facebook finally removes the objectionable content.
For more than one year the California-based technology company Facebook kept a page that showed images of children below which users posted sexual abuse comments, The Guardian reported.
The company also kept posts that advertised rape videos and had a page on a child-sex ring, Kerala police told the court.
These instances were part of the hearing in the Supreme Court of India to check how the tech companies, which include Facebook and Google, have been handling abusive content from India.
According to the documents submitted by Facebook to the Indian court, the company admitted that it does not inform the police in India about the child-abuse material. The company said such instances are reported to American authorities, despite the fact that as per local child-protection laws it is mandatory for the company to inform the local police.
The company said it received 7,802 complaints about child-abuse material from users between March 2016 and August in 2017. It said it “investigated all reports and took appropriate action.â€
However, during the hearings, the court was told other facts. Apparently, Facebook had refused to bring down the page which was titled “little vagina†when translated into Telugu. The page’s title was otherwise written in Roman script on Facebook.
Aparna Bhat, the attorney who argued the case in the court for the Indian NGO Prajwala, told the court that it was not until the court’s order that Facebook finally relented and removed some of the posts.
Responding to the allegations in the court, the tech company said in an affidavit that it was “committed to providing a service where people feel safe.†Its spokeswoman said, “There is no place on Facebook for content that threatens or promotes sexual violence or exploitation, and we work hard to keep it off our platform.â€
The court ordered the tech companies including Yahoo, WhatsApp, Microsoft and Google “to work with the Indian government to expand their list of keywords associated with child abuse material.”
The court will hear the case again on December 11.