Published On:Thursday 23 August 2012
PMO asked Times of India and Hindustan Times to stop allowing comments on Govt related articles or will shut their sites
HT found solution, to replace abusive content with sugary word automatically
After a great win against Twitter, which agreed to remove 6 fake PM accounts the government now put its sword on two leading news paper websites of Times of India (TOI) and Hindustan Times (HT) over allowing lakhs of users to pass insulting comments on each and every article related to government. These two websites were earlier accused of behaving as PR agencies of the government. However, the accusations are not proved till death. It is said that the Twitter will remove @Indian_pm, @PMOIndiaa, @dryumyumsingh, @PM0India accounts along with two others.
"The guys who pass the comments on each and every article on TOI and HT are idiots. They use any kind of foul language. Our real concern is how these levels of reputed news papers such as TOI and HT allow them to call somebody stup*d, id*ot and what not ridiculous hindi gaaliyan. Therefore finally we issued a warning to these two newspapers and asked them to remove all the comments from the articles their websites which are abusive, insulting and derogatory for the PM, Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Congress Pary and other Senior Congress Party leaders," said the prime minister's communications adviser, Pankaj Pachauri.He said "We forwarded a written warning cum request to these news papers that either they remove the comments or their websites would be shut down permanently."
While TOI spokesperson was unavailable for the comment, HT spokesperson said "How can we remove the comments? If we remove each and every abusive and insulting comment on the government, we will have to remove all the content and make our website totally unfriendly to users."
The spokesperson said "100% of the comments are abusive for the government and all their representatives. Otherwise we were first to remove them. However, we sent a solution to the government that each and every abusive word would be replaced automatically by some sweet and sugary coated word like if somebody is calling id*ot it would be reflected as intelligent, and if somebody is calling f*ker it would be replaced by the word sexy."
The government is yet to respond to the suggestion and forwarded HT's request to BJP for taking decision on whether to oppose it or not.