Warn users against posting illegal content, govt tells social media platforms

All social media platforms should develop anin-app mechanism to report violations as per Constitution, says IT ministry.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) wants all social media platforms to develop an in-app mechanism to report violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, and to inform users how uploading content that violates this rule can attract punishment under other Indian laws. It also wants platforms to assist in identifying and enabling prosecution of content violations.

The minister of state for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar communicated this to the major social media companies, telecom companies and device manufacturers in a follow-up meeting over the deepfakes issue on Tuesday.

“Many platforms are responding to the decisions taken last month and advisories on ensuring 100% compliance will be issued in the next 2 days,” he tweeted after the meeting.

After the last meeting on November 24, Chandrasekhar said the ministry would appoint a nodal officer to look at platforms’ safe harbour status under Rule 7 who will also assist users to file FIRs. His presentation on Tuesday, however, said, “Rule 7/Section 79 adjudication rule to be played by GAC [grievance appellate committee]”. The IT Rules were amended in October 2022 to allow for the creation of three government-appointed GACs which would act as a tier of grievance redressal above the platforms’ own grievance officers. HT has seen a copy of this presentation.

Tuesday’s meeting was attended by representatives from Meta, Google/YouTube, Snapchat, Sharechat, Koo, Telegram, Samsung, Jio, industry body NASSCOM, and at least one independent telecom expert. Chaired by Chandrasekhar, IT secretary S. Krishnan, and head of the IT ministry’s cyber laws division, Dr Sandip Chatterjee, also attended the meeting.

Chandrasekhar wants the platforms’ community guidelines to map out how posting each of the eleven types of content described in rule 3(1)(b) would attract penalties and punishments under other laws such as the Indian Penal Code, Prevention of Money Laundering Act, Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act, Digital Personal Data Protection Act and Copyright Act, amongst others. He acknowledged that Koo had already done this mapping.

The ministry wants platforms to inform users of the legal actions they can take when the content they report is actually removed. In its presentation, the ministry listed “Platform to actively assist in identifying & enabling prosecution of violation of 3(1)(b), 3(1)(d)” for discussion. This could involve filing FIRs against the person who uploaded the egregious content, or other remedies available under different laws.

Both Meta and YouTube argued against this. YouTube said that for certain kinds of content, such as child sexual abuse material, the decision to remove it is a no-brainer. To be sure, all platforms report CSAM to the US’s National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) which then shares the data with relevant law enforcement agencies across the world.

However, for other kinds of content, such as copyright violations, a legal mind needs to be applied and platforms cannot do that without endangering their safe harbour, the YouTube representative said. The representative also pointed out that if platforms help reporting users identify the users who posted the egregious content for the purposes of pursuing legal action, that would be a violation of the Puttaswamy judgment on the right to privacy.

The ministry took stock of which companies had submitted status reports on whether their community guidelines “aligned” with rule 3(1)(b) as per the discussion in the meeting on November 24. In its presentation, MeitY acknowledged that Telegram had submitted this status report while others were in the process of reviewing their guidelines. In its presentation, the ministry wrote, “The 3(1)(b) list and hyperlink to the community guidelines is NOT provided by most platforms in their annual reminder emails”.

Read more news like this on HindustanTimes.com