LUCKNOW: A team of over a dozen tech-savvy policemen, headed by a woman deputy superintendent of police, at the Signature Building headquarters of the UP Police had a key job to do over the weekend —monitoring the social media round the clock.
Along with over 250 personnel dedicated to the social media job across districts under what was dubbed ‘Operation Eagle’, this team in Lucknow acted against 8,275 posts on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube over Saturday and Sunday for posting offensive messages. They sent each user a ‘Direct Message’ or contacted privately on the social media platform, telling him or her to delete the post or face action, UP officials told ET.
Most of the people removed their posts, while 77, who refused to do so, were arrested — 37 of them on Saturday and the rest on Sunday.
Twitter saw the most number of violations at 5,294 over the last two days. While these accounted for about 64% of all social media violations, there were 2,210 such posts red-flagged on Facebook and 167 on YouTube. UP’s additional director-general (law & order), PV Ramasastry, told ET that the team at the police headquarters was aided by social media teams of three to five officials in each district which were put in place over the last one year or so.
“These social media teams in the districts were specially trained for the Ayodhya verdict,” Ramasastry said. Many inputs also came in from a virtual army of 2.42 lakh “digital volunteers” registered with the UP Police. These were mainly citizens who alert the police about offensive social media posts or inflammatory WhatsApp messages.
“The idea was to bust anonymity on social media and increase our capability to reach any such user and take action. People in the virtual world should not think that they can make an inflammatory post and get away,” Ramasastry said.
“Hate-mongering” traffic had tapered out by the date of the Ayodhya verdict, showing that the action by the UP Police had a deterrent effect, he said. “Our endeavour was two-folded — a strong presence with boots on the ground and a close eye on the cyber world. Both were important.”
[“source=economictimes”]
