Twitter search for DU leading to adult content: Users

A search on Twitter for bare facts related to Delhi University (DU) is throwing up unexpected results -- a slew of bare bodies.
Pornographic sites pop up after some genuine posts related to DU when a person seeking news about the university scrolls down, users said.
The huge online traffic that DU generates during the admission season is being misused by clickbait websites -- which seek to divert users to other links, experts said.
These Twitter handles add the words Delhi University to their names for drawing viewers, especially young Netizens, to pornographic sites.
A DU aspirant's parent, Uma Prashanth, said she was "shocked" when a search on Twitter led her to erotic clips.

"Just before the release of the first cut-offs, we were tense and constantly checking for updates on Twitter. It was embarrassing to find erotic clips and links to such websites," she said.

Some handles, completed unrelated to DU, refer to "Delhi University hot girls" and "Naked Delhi University girls".
A senior Delhi police officer handling cyber crime said some "loopholes" in search engines were being utilised to draw traffic to porn sites.
"Basically such loopholes are used to divert traffic from one platform to another. Upon receiving such complaints we request the service provider to tweak the algorithm so that such results don't appear," he said.

Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal said the government should look at ways to regulate search engines.
"They pick up current topics and include the keywords in their Tweets. In this case Delhi University is popular because of admissions. A user using such keywords will end up getting all this content," he said.
Duggal said the solution was to form algorithms that would be able to weed out unwanted sites and added that Information Technology Rules 2011 needed to be updated to deal with such scenarios.
"This should be curbed and such sources blocked," DU deputy proctor Sanjeev Singh said, pointing out that "a large number of young minds" looked for information on the Net during the admission season.

The DU registrar and Twitter India were not available for comments.