NewIndpress
New Delhi, Dec 3: Do you hate Ekta Kapoor's serials, Himesh Reshamiya's nasal voice or Shah Rukh Khan's exaggerated mannerism and criticize them in your social circles?
Well, there are people who go a step ahead creating special space on the World Wide Web to invite brickbats against their favourite hate icons.
On Orkut , membership of the leading hate communities like Ekta Kapoor (76,468), Himesh Reshamiya (33,137), Shah Rukh Khan (11,179), Greg Chappell (7,659), Musharraf (1,362) Amitabh Bachchan (1,410) is in thousands.
Even Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi has not been spared, with the leading hate community We hate Gandhi boasting a strong membership of 6647, besides many other communities having a membership in hundreds. Ironically, Gandhi's killer, Nathuram Godse has no presence in the hate club of Orkut or Facebook .
What makes such communities and groups popular in net users? Psychiatrist Sameer Parekh feels that such communities become popular because they appeal to our hatred for certain things.
"People have certain amount of hatred, dislikes and complexities and they get a chance to express it on such communities. But, there are very few people who give importance to such things. They reinforce your point of view and you join them without giving much thought."
While most communities may be an ideal way to express the common dislikes about the regular things in life with a humorous tone, but recently objections have been raised over some communities for hurting sentiments. Social networking sites are also trying to come up with new methods to prevent the abuse of such communities.
"We take the abuse of Orkut seriously and are constantly developing new tools to review inappropriate content on the site. Orkut users can report content to our reviewers by clicking the 'report as bogus' button. There are also tools for community owners to delete posts or topics, ban users and delete anonymous posts," says Google Spokesperson.
"But At the same time, we put a certain amount of trust in our users to notify us of violations. We have also introduced a priority reporting tool. It makes it easier for the police to contact us when they get concerns about content on Orkut ," adds the spokesperson.
Though, the regular measures are being taken to check the misuse, regulating such communities is still a problem.