NEW DELHI: India said on Wednesday that it had requested assistance from the United States and Saudi Arabia in identifying persons who released doctored images on social media networks that they argue fomenting the mass exodus of citizens from the northeast in fear of violent reprisals against them earlier this month. The Home Ministry said it was also considering legal action against social media platforms, including the micro-blogging site Twitter, that failed to comply with its directives to end access to the offensive webpages. IT and social media experts in New Delhi telling Bikyamasr.com that the government should work with, not against, companies to end hate speech online. “If they take legal action against Twitter it could result in a backlash they don't want. Twitter is open source and it would be extremely hard to ban it in India, not to mention the repercussions it would have on the IT world here," said one telecom official. India said many of the websites that sparked the exodus of northeast people are located in Pakistan. Reports said New Delhi wants the US to push Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, social networking sites Facebook and Twitter and Google-controlled YouTube to preserve data on their servers beyond the mandatory 30-day period to enable Indian experts to cull cyber forensic evidence to nail the culprits. Doctored images of violence on websites caused a massive exodus of tens of thousands of people from the northeast states of India over the past one week. The images were accompanied with rumors that Muslims would attack people from the northeast after the Eid el-Fitr holiday, which began on Monday, due to communal violence in the northeast Indian Assam state which has killed over 70 people.
