Facebook is on a roll in India and while Delhi Traffic Police is using it for collecting traffic challans, an interesting incident has occurred in Vadodara (Gujarat).
A school has suspended six students of Classes X and XII for allegedly using abusive language on Facebook and District Education Officer has even ordered an inquiry into the same.
“Three girls, one from Class X and two from Class XII, started a thread in which they accused the school authorities, a teacher and three other students of rigging the election. The issue escalated after students backing the elected candidate replied using strong language.” – source
At the core, there lies a lot of questions – what’s the liability of your online discussions? Indian government doesn’t yet have a clear cut policy and most of such cases are driven by intensity of the situation. What happened to heated discussions that used to happen in closed groups like Yahoo/Google groups? How has Facebook’s sudden hype changed our cyber policy?
Aside, such stories were common with Orkut, which has pretty much lost to Facebook in India.
Update: Vadodara school has evoked the suspension after the 6 girls apologized. Well, the core of this matter remains to be answered.
