NEW DELHI: The Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police on Wednesday blocked 23 Twitter accounts for allegedly posting content related to child pornography and rape. According to officials, the police initiated action in the regard just days after the Delhi Commission for Women issued notice to Delhi Police and Twitter India to take action against accounts on the micro-blogging platform which are posting child pornography and other obscene content.
According to Deputy Commissioner of Police (IFSO) Prashant Gautam, information linking Twitter accounts to child pornography was received on September 20. “An FIR was filed on September 20 once information was received. Following this, we had collected evidence. Subsequently, we wrote to Twitter to block the accounts and sought important details about the accounts,” he said.
“Four teams of two technical and two on the ground groups were formed. The investigation is underway and we are also waiting for a reply from Twitter regarding the accounts,”said the DCP, adding that the IFSO had registered 189 cases and arrested 132 people in December 2021 and January 2022 in the last operation conducted in this regard in coordination with the district police.
The officials said that the IFSO is planning to take action against such handles in the coming days.
Meanwhile, in its statement, the Delhi Commission for Women had asked Twitter to submit the details of the action taken by them to prevent such “filthy and outrightly criminal acts” from being propagated through their medium, as well as regarding the systems in place on the platform to immediately report the same to law enforcement agencies.
As per the DCW statement, the tweets in question were openly depicting videos and photographs of sexual acts involving children. Almost all the tweets were portraying children completely naked and many of them also depicted brutal rape and other non-consensual sexual activities with children and women, it said.
Twitter representatives informed the commission that all the accounts the commission had flagged had been deleted in response to the summons. They did, however, only provide a partial response. The commission granted their request for further time to prepare a thorough response. They have until September 30 to submit a thorough, point-by-point response, according to the statement.