Yet another controversy for Orkut.

Yesterday our news channels somehow managed to squeeze a bit of time out from more pressing matters; such as the visit of Samlan Khan’s family to the jail on Rakhi or the public display of affection by the constabulary towards Sanjay Dutt, to show us the recent controversy about Orkut. Apparently, someone in Orkut has created a community called “I hate Mayawati” and the UP chief Minister has taken umbrage (if that’s what people take when they are offended) to some of the postings. Our overenthusiastic and extremely responsible media even flashed the name and hometown of the person who has created the community. One of the senior government official commented that “the matter has been forwarded to the cyber crime department”. Surely our governments have got there priorities right. This is exactly what the cyber crime department should have been doing all along. Now all they need to do is to call the army to hunt down that poor soul who took the “freedom of speech” phrase a bit too seriously.

However, I’m glad with the reaction of Google. They have not removed the community yet. They should treat this just like any other abuse report. It took us a lot of effort to remove the “I hate India” community from Orkut. It’ll be interesting to see if Google changes its review procedure to soothe the government officials.

This brings me to a more generic question, i.e. should Google (or any other website) be responsible for the user generated content. If the answer is “yes”, then is removing the content after someone has reported for abuse good enough? Would you trust the sites to act immediately, if it’s clear that they stand to gain by not removing the content?