he Gulf region’s social media experts gathered at the GCC Government Social Media Summit in Dubai to share the experiences in the field of the sector. The experts from public and private sector underlined the need to harness the potential of the social media as a tool to reach out to the people and address their concerns in an effective manner. The two day summit will also highlight the growing challenges for the Governments to find how to respond to the social media. Dubai Telecommunications Regulatory Authority representative said that Governments should not only move with the times but stay ahead of the times, by anticipating social media trends and planning accordingly. The Director of the Dubai School of Government and the Conference Chairman, Fadi Salem told that Governments can no longer afford to be reactive, and must now be proactive. It means preventing any miscommunication or misconception before it even occurs, through regular two-way dialogue on social media networks. The representatives from UAE, USA, UK and New Zealand shared their experiences with the usage of social media. UAE is the leader in terms of social media network usage in the Arab world followed by Qatar. The facebook users in the Arab world have tripled in just two years from 16 million to 45 million. Half of the new additions were in the previous year alone. Twitter remains a reliable barometer of the region’s biggest talking points with approximately 6 million tweets per day which comes to almost 70 per second. Majority of the region’s social media users, around 70%, are the youth between 15-29 years. The region has been a witness to the political upheavals in the region associated with an effective use of social media networks to mobilize public opinion and hence, the summit holds a lot of potential for the Governments in the gulf region.

Announcement

Twitter today conveyed to the Prime Minister's office that action has been taken against the fake PMO twitter handlesसंचलन करना. The Prime Minister's Office had requested Twitter to take appropriate action against six persons impersonating the PMO. When they did not reply for a long time, the Government Cyber Security Cell was requested to initiate action. Now, the fake handles have been removed.

 overnment today clarified that it is not targetting individual accounts or websites and does not want restrictions on genuine users. Talking to reporters in New Delhi, Communication and Information Technology Minister, Kapil Sibal said that Facebook and Google are cooperating with government and decided to close down the objectionable sites. He said, the difficulty is with twitter sites as it operates from outside India and the server of all such sites are outside the jurisdiction of India. He however said that twitter have expressed their willingness for talks with the government to bring a solution to the issue. 

The Minister said that the government has also provided 28 Universal Resource Locator numbers to twitter under which objectionable material is being shown. He said, the reports about the government aggressively targeting some accounts or websites, are incorrect.

he government today issued guidelines for its departments using social media networks asking them not to post confidential information and unverified facts.

The Ministry of IT issued guidelines today. The guide lines asked persons handling social media for all government agencies including public sector undertakings not to comment
and respond unless authorised to do so especially in the matters that are sub-judice, draft legislations or relating to other individuals.

Asking social media handlers to be polite, discrete and respectful, the guidelines said personal comments for or against any individual or agencies should not be made and
professional discussions should not be politicised.

 he government on Wednesday said it was working with social networking sites to create an institutional mechanism to prevent misuse of technology.

Speaking to reporters outside Parliament, Information and Technology minister Kapil Sibal said that there are difficulties in identifying people using websites to spread communal hatred.

He said some social networking websites have agreed to share user information with the Government but there were some procedural issues involved.

 n the backdrop of appeals by India to remove hate posts, world's largest social networking website Facebook today said it will remove content, block pages or even disable accounts of those users who upload contents that incite violence or perpetuate hate speech. cause to continue or prevail

Comprehending the gravity, Facebook's stern warning to its users comes in the wake of the Indian government bringing to its notice the posting of contents, including inflammatory matters and doctored pictures and videos to create social unrest in the country.In fact, Facebook has already removed quite a significant number of such "inflammatory" and "hate" contents from its website and in some cases blocked pages.

A spokesman of the site said if any user repeatedly tries to upload such hateful content, Facebook can even disable the account. Expressing serious concern over the current situation in India wherein people have tried to use Facebook as a tool to incite violence or spread hate, the official said Facebook has taken a number of measures to prevent this.

Pakistani government has banned the social networking website Twitter. According to the country's ministry of information technology, the website was banned due to blasphemous(ईश्वर या किसी पवित्र वस्तु की निन्दा करना) and inflammatory content. 

Calls for particiaption in inflammatory contests were being made on Twitter and it was due to this that such a step was taken. Twitter is very popular in Pakistan and is also used by many prominent politicians and law-makers.