The Supreme Court Friday issued notice to Centre and Twitter India on a plea seeking a mechanism to stop social media platforms like the latter from spreading fake, hateful and instigative content in contravention of the laws of the country.
Seeking their responses on the plea by BJP leader Vinit Goenka, a bench headed by Chief Justice of India S A Bobde directed that the petition be tagged with similar pending petitions praying for laws to regulate social media content.
The plea, filed through Advocate Ashwani Kumar Dubey, contended that fake news “is the root cause of many riots” and added that in the absence of any law to deal with offensive and hateful message, platforms like Twitter are knowingly promoting content which is against the law of the land. The plea also referred to the recent order of the Central government asking Twitter to block several handles spreading allegedly provocative content.
