Basic search on the social networking site, Twitter about Delhi University (DU) is showing unexpected results — a slew of bare bodies. Pornographic sites pop up after some genuine posts related to DU when a person seeking news about the university, users said.
The huge online traffic that DU generates during the admission season is being misused by clickbait websites — which seek to divert users to other links, experts said.
These Twitter handles add the words Delhi University to their names for drawing viewers, especially young Netizens, to pornographic sites. A DU aspirant’s parent, Uma Prashanth, said she was “shocked” when a search on Twitter led her to erotic clips. “Just before the release of the first cut-offs, we were tense and constantly checking for updates on Twitter. It was embarrassing to find erotic clips and links to such websites,” she said. Some handles, completed unrelated to DU, refer to “Delhi University hot girls” and “Naked Delhi University girls”.
A senior Delhi Police officer handling cyber crime said some “loopholes” in search engines were being utilised to draw traffic to porn sites. “Basically such loopholes are used to divert traffic from one platform to another. Upon receiving such complaints we request the service provider to tweak the algorithm so that such results don’t appear,” he said. Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal said the Government should look at ways to regulate search engines.
“They pick up current topics and include the keywords in their Tweets. In this case Delhi University is popular because of admissions. A user using such keywords will end up getting all this content,” he said.
Duggal said the solution was to form algorithms that would be able to weed out unwanted sites and added that Information Technology Rules 2011 needed to be updated to deal with such scenarios.