377 sites took down child porn on govt bidding: Smriti Irani

Smriti Irani sought the support of House members in reporting such online content.

As many as 377 websites have taken down child pornography content at the government’s behest, and 50 FIRs have been filed in this regard, Minister for Women and Child Development Smriti Irani informed Rajya Sabha on Friday.

Responding to the issue of increasing incidents of child sexual abuse raised by AIADMK’s Vijila Sathyananth during Zero Hour, Irani sought the support of House members in reporting such online content.

Sathyananth cited recent incidents of sexual assault of minor girls to seek complete ban on websites carrying child pornography.

In a separate Zero Hour submission, Congress MP Rajeev Gowda flagged the issue of social media platforms censoring content. Gowda cited the recent incident of Twitter suspending lawyer Sanjay Hegde’s account to seek guidelines that would clearly define what is considered offensive and what isn’t.

“What we see here is that there is a structural problem out there with unregulated Internet platforms. They need to bring in some guidelines so we have a clear sense of what is allowed and what is not and appeal mechanisms… Otherwise we are seeing free speech subject to private censorship,” the Congress MP said.

Another senior Congress MP, Digvijaya Singh, said the number of policy holders of LIC has reduced from 33 crore to 29 crore during the period 2014-19 and stressed “mistrust” in public institutions among the masses was on the rise.— With PTI inputs