The Centre has made up its mind to make a strong push for legal bindings on social media sites and force them to have their servers in India in order to keep tabs on malicious and dangerous content.

A meeting with leading social media websites - Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Flicker is expected to be held shortly to bring them on board to have their servers in India, top government sources said. The concerns were first raised by former NSA Shivshankar Menon in a meeting on August 27, 2012 where he had expressed concerns about malicious and dangerous content on websites and suggest ways how to deal with it.

Since then department of electronics and information technology (DEITY) came out with a paper titled "Framework to deal with malicious information posted on web and social media sites" in which it suggested strategies (operational, legal and jurisdictional) that need to be adopted to filter them out. The officials of union home ministry and other stakeholders - DEITY and law and justice ministry held a meeting on December 19 last year that worked out the legal provisions that could be enforced to have their servers in India.

In the next meeting to be held shortly with leading social media websites the Centre wants to have a straight talk with them on this issue as the current system of blocking a malicious or potentially dangerous content takes time to come into effect by when the damage is done as there is very little lead time in hand to stop such things go viral.

"The new media wing that has been specially set up by the Information and Broadcasting ministry continuously co-ordinates with the union home ministry by sending the contents trending on the social media web sites but often it has a time lag that is enough to make the content go viral," sources said. To check the menace of dangerous and malicious content, the Centre has told the state governments to have IG level nodal officers to coordinate within the State and with the Centre to ensure strict legal administrative action against such contents.