Social media and user generated content have become subject to very intense scrutiny, with calls for regulatory mechanisms in different parts of the world. But like other cybersecurity issues, perspectives on this issue have diverged sharply from country to country.

While the developed world is exercised about intellectual property rights online, the potential to disrupt law and order is of greater concern in developing countries which lack both the skills and technologies to adequately monitor cyberspace for disruptive activities.

Two recent incidents have starkly highlighted these problems. In the first, on May 20, a 26-year-old woman was robbed, raped and murdered in the Rakhine State of Myanmar. The ensuing riots, which began around June 3, left 80 dead and 80,000 displaced.

Pages were created in Pakistan and West Asia and even as far as Australia, containing misleading information and photoshopped pictures, and were placed on Facebook, and other social networking sites and websites, primarily to incite the population in those countries to rise up in protest.

These had the desired effect not just in those countries, but also in India where they were juxtaposed with unconnected incidents in Assam to inflame passions and threat of violence against people from Northeast India.

In a similar pattern, a Coptic-American filmmaker made a two-hour long film denigrating Islam in 2011. A 14-minute "trailer" was uploaded to YouTube in July. A version was dubbed into Arabic and added to YouTube in the first week of September which was then copied and viewed repeatedly.

As a result, the US embassy in Egypt was attacked, as also the US consulate in Banghazi, Libya, resulting in the death of US ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other personnel on September 11. Other protests spread worldwide.

What these events bring to light is the use of new media to manipulate emotions with the end goal of inciting violence.

The rapidity at which information and misinformation can be transmitted around the world means that events unfold much faster than authorities can respond.

The mischief makers, who could be anybody from individuals to groups to the dirty tricks departments of governments, are shielded by the anonymity of the online world and more such campaigns may be expected sooner than later.

This brings us to the question of appropriate responses.

In the Rakhine case, the Indian government took a series of actions including requesting companies to remove contentious content, and also blocking access to particular pages using national technical means. The government apparently went as far as considering blocking Twitter altogether if it did not comply with requests.

In the second case, YouTube has blocked the video in several Islamic countries.

Actions such as the blocking of website URLs have been criticized by many for being anti-democratic and ad hoc. But law enforcement machinery has found itself completely out of depth in trying to deploy offline mechanisms in the online world.

For instance, the usual way to maintain calm in a troubled area is to impose a curfew. However, blocking URLs is a very poor equivalent of a curfew since for every URL blocked, a thousand other copies of the blocked content can spring up.

Official authority is all but absent in the online world where the emphasis is on self-regulation and community policing.

There is much scope for improvement in this regard. The laws need to be made more precise so that there is little scope for confusion.

Companies such as YouTube and Facebook deploy the latest technologies to catch instances of intellectual property right infringement but are much less enthusiastic about using the same technologies to follow up on government requests to locate and block content.

With international consensus on whether content regulation should also form part of negotiations on framing rules of the road in cybersecurity lacking and unlikely to be resolved any time soon, only a combination of stricter laws and enforcement through domestic monitoring mechanisms will mitigate the issue for now.

The author is associate fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn