Calcutta: Calcutta high court on Wednesday set aside a lower
court order that had asked a central government nodal officer to
instruct Facebook to block links to articles published by a Darjeeling
newspaper.
The chief metropolitan magistrate's court in Calcutta had ordered the blocking of 11 links of Darjeeling Chronicles in June 2017.
The order was issued on a plea by the cyber crime department
of Calcutta Police on the premise that the articles were "against
national interest" and instigating "common people to wage war against
the nation".
The police sought the embargo on the articles in the middle of the Gorkhaland agitation in the hills.
After blocking the links, the Facebook moved the high court challenging the lower court's order.
Justice Siddhartha Chatterjee said on Wednesday that if the state
government wanted to block any Facebook posts in future, it would have
to follow the rules - first, approach a state nodal officer, who would,
in turn, refer to his central counterpart.
Moving the appeal, the counsels of Facebook, Siddharth Luthra
and Souvik Mitter, asked whether the CMM court had powers to issue such
an order merely on the basis of a general diary lodged by the police.
They also told the high court that central rules were not
followed in the case and the state was yet to appoint a nodal officer to
deal with social media posts.
Advocate general Kishore Dutta and public prosecutor Swasata
Gopal Mukherjee argued that the police had to act as there was an
attempt to instigate the people of the hills to wage a war against
nation. They said the Bengal government had already appointed a nodal
officer to look after matters related to posts or links in the social
media.
After hearing both the sides, the judge on Wednesday set aside the lower court's order.
Some lawyers of the high Court, however, said strict adherence
to the central rules was not possible in all cases. "Social media posts
go viral in minutes... And the process of redress takes a long time,
and by then, a lot of damage can be done," said advocate Ashim Ganguly.
The Telegraph
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