Singer Chinmayi moots regulatory body for social media

"I definitely believe that it would make things easy if the general public could get help when they needed and if action is taken, on a few people. I am sure it might serve as a warning. May be a regulatory body might also help", Chinmayi, who has sung in several Tamil, Malayalam films, said.u00a0

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But the singer, an active user of Facebook, Twitter and has her own blog for several years, is also conscious of the need to protect freedom of expression in a democracy.u00a0

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"I am not sure yet. It is a democratic country and as long as nothing happens to infringe on a fundamental right, it would be help. Whether the help is for women or men," she told PTI days after cyber crime police here arrested two persons for allegedly harassing her on micro blogging site Twitter.u00a0

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Saravana Kumar Perumal, a faculty at the National Institute of Fashion Technology or NIFT, and an employee of Tiruppur Collectorate were arrested based on the probe into Chinmayi's complaint that since January last year a few individuals posted vulgar comments on Twitter about her and her mother.u00a0

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"The right to freedom of speech and expression cannot and should not be curtailed in this country. There is also right to dissent and criticism. But it has to be done in a manner that criticizes a certain act. Abuse, derogatory comments and vulgarity should be avoided. If this method is used as a ploy in a bid to harass, then it is quite serious," she noted.u00a0

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Explaining the reason behind her decision to seek police intervention, she said it was easy to tell a victim of harassment on a social networking portal "to be strong" but the fact remains that most of us go into battle alone."u00a0

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"The affected person knows and goes through the trauma... Even during this incident, it was not easy (for me) to go through abuse for an entire two years. I felt why am I, of all people being targeted by people who do not know me? who have nothing to do with me nor do I have anything to with them?..," she said.

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