The Delhi Commission For Women (DCW) issued summons to Twitter and the Delhi police over the alleged availability of child pornography videos on the social media platform. The Delhi Police and Twitter have been given time till September 26 to respond to the summons and there have been no responses from the police or website yet.
The Chairperson for DCW Swati Maliwal said, “The Chandigarh University incident set me thinking and I asked my team to investigate. We found videos of minor girls on Twitter in which they were seen being raped. Some of the platforms were even selling these videos for 20 rupees to 30 rupees. This is horrific.”
DCW Summons Twitter
Maliwal said that videos of children and women being raped were being circulated on the platform. She said, “And these tweets are being retweeted and they have been on the platform for months.”
At the press conference, she showed screenshots of the alleged tweets with child pornography and claimed that they were uploaded with a message that the videos would be sold at prices as low as 20 rupees.
The commission shared a list of such tweets with the Delhi police and Twitter and DCW summoned the Twitter India policy head and the Delhi police over the same. According to the commission, most of the tweets showed naked children and many of them depicted incidents of non-consensual sexual activities and rape.
The Twitter official was summoned to ascertain the steps taken by the website to prevent such content and the systems in place to report such content to law enforcement agencies.
The commission also asked the platform to provide reasons for why tweets containing child pornography were neither deleted nor deleted. The DCW sought data regarding the number of tweets with child pornography available on the platform and the number of such tweets deleted and reported by Twitter in the past four years.
In the DCW’s summons to the Delhi police, the panel also sought an FIR regarding the matter and recommended that children and women visible in pornographic and rape videos be identified and assisted.
The Delhi police have also been asked to provide the number of such tweets reported by the social media platform in the past and whether FIRs were registered and if the accused were arrested. They were also asked to inform the commission about the steps taken to ensure no videos depicting child pornography or rape are present on the platform.
The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act was amended to include stringent punishment for those found possessing or distributing child pornographic content on March 9, 2020.
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