Social networking website Facebook said on Tuesday it recognizes Indian government's interest in minimizing the amount of abusive content online, and it will remove any content violating its terms.

We will remove any content that violates our terms, which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service, Facebook said in a statement.

India has told several leading Internet companies including Facebook and Google they need to remove offensive content from their services, the information and telecoms minister said earlier on Tuesday, but he insisted the request was not censorship.

(Reporting by Anurag Kotoky; editing by Malini Menon)

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