Police to act against unauthorised news pages on Facebook

“In order to vitiate peaceful environment some disgruntled elements are running a number of pages on social networking sites on which news items are maliciously distorted to give jaundiced slant to a particular incident,” police spokesman said. “On such youth was identified from downtown Srinagar who was summoned and later on released after counseling him”.

Though the newspapers are bound to get registration from RNI,the news pages on the social networking sites are not registered anywhere. In fact,a large number of Facebook news pages have been set from Kashmir,in recent times,publishing daily news on the social networking site. Most of these pages publish news without any corroboration. Recently,a Facebook news page blamed the Special Operations Group (SOG) of J-K Police for murder of a youth in south Kashmir. The youth was killed by his neighbour. The page also reported that the irate people of the village set ablaze the house of the police personnel,which was not true.

The controversy over the Pragash rock band also started from a news page on the Facebook where some youth posted abuses against the girls’ rock band.

Police say that the aim of the proposed action against the news pages on Facebook is to prevent the erosion of credibility of the media and have sought support from the media organizations. “This truancy on the part of some people is eroding the credibility of media,” the spokesman said.

“We are soliciting the cooperation of media to identify such elements so that the journalistic ethics and sanctity of media is upheld”.