A plea has been moved in the Supreme Court to issue direction to the Centre to hold social media companies -- Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram etc -- directly responsible for spreading hate speeches among society.
The plea by advocate Vineet Jindal through advocate-on-record Raj Kishor Choudhary contends that the country has seen plenty of communal violence in the past, but in the current scenario with the advent of social media, these aggressions are not just restricted to the regional or local population, the entire country is taken along.
"The fog of rumours, innuendo, and hate that act as kindling in a local communal clash immediately spread across India through social media. This has reduced the social distance between local communal conflict and national communal polarisation," the plea argued.
Emphasizing on the power of social media, the plea argued that in today's scenario, a local communal conflict can be made a national issue within seconds, and a larger communal narrative can quickly be constructed from a patchwork of local incidents.
