The Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) Chairperson Swati Maliwal on Tuesday issued summonses to the microblogging website Twitter, and Delhi Police over pornographic videos on Twitter involving women and children. Maliwal claimed that these were sold for Rs 20, and Twitter is yet to delete them and report it further. Twitter and the Delhi Police have been given time till September 26 to respond to the summonses.
“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 Rs 20 to Rs 30. This is horrific,” Maliwal told reporters.
She said she has asked Twitter how such videos are existing on the site and what policies does it have for checking such content.
Maliwal has asked the Delhi Police to register an FIR to identify those involved in filming and uploading such videos as well as the victims and the accused.
“Thousands of people have shared recordings of young girls being raped. Videos of women bathing are being put through intelligence cameras. These companies follow laws abroad and turn a blind eye to the obscenity and rape of women in India,” Maliwal wrote on Twitter.
According to a DCW official, they have taken took suo moto cognizance of several tweets on Twitter openly depicting videos and photographs of sexual acts involving children.
In the summons issued to Twitter, the commission has stated that it is deeply distressed that such illegal acts involving sexual abuse of children and young women were being publicized through the social media platform. “The commission has summoned Twitter official in order to ascertain the steps being taken by them to prevent such filthy and outrightly criminal acts being propagated through their medium as well as the systems in place in the platform to immediately report the same to law enforcement agencies,” said the official.
“Specifically, the commission has asked them to provide reasons why the tweets were neither deleted nor reported by Twitter. The commission has also sought data regarding the number of such tweets presently available on Twitter. Further, it has sought the number of tweets depicting child pornography and rape identified, deleted, and reported by Twitter in the past four years,” said the official. The commission has also issued summons to Delhi Police seeking an FIR in the matter.
According to official, most of the tweets portrayed children completely naked and many of them also depicted brutal rape and other non-consensual sexual activities with children and women. “Shockingly, some of these videos even depicted rape with children and women while they were asleep!,” said the DCW official.