Open to stricter social media guidelines, says Govt

His assertion in Rajya Sabha, in response to a query by Anand Sharma of the Congress, got here 4 days after senior officers of the ministries of Information and Broadcasting in addition to IT met senior executives from Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to grasp the method of flagging, demoting and takedown of controversial content material.

Those current on the January 31 assembly, referred to as by the I&B ministry, mentioned this was not a one-off assembly, and can be carried out at the very least as soon as each quarter, if no more, to maintain the federal government apprised of developments within the content material takedown course of .

Vaishnaw informed Rajya Sabha that the federal government is open to much more strict social media guidelines to carry them accountable.

“I personally consider that for the safety of our residents, we should make the principles stricter. At this level of time, we’re working inside the Constitutional framework. The position of the state and the position of the Centre, each must be seen in perspective. We have to come back ahead as a society and create far more accountability for social media,” he mentioned.

Replying to a query by BJP’s Sushil Kumar Modi who needed to know what motion had been taken towards websites which had put up defamatory pictures of Muslim girls and tried to public sale them off, Vaishnaw mentioned that defending the dignity of girls on-line was a elementary assemble, and there can be no compromise on it.

“It is our dedication. Whatever data got here to us, we instantly acted upon it,” he mentioned.
He mentioned every time the federal government tried to take steps to make social media extra accountable, it was the Opposition which alleged that freedom of speech was being taken away.

On the January 31 assembly, a senior government of a social media middleman mentioned: “The MeitY now has a course of whereby they flag to us content material which they assume is controversial. We do our personal inner evaluate of the content material and based mostly on the result of that evaluate, or return and clarify to the ministry our causes for not taking down the content material. Officials from Broadcasting (I&B) needed to grasp the method higher.”

According to officers current on the assembly, the I&B ministry requested the social media intermediaries how they tackled faux information, anti-India content material, nudity, porn and different controversial content material on their platforms. They additionally needed to know what the platforms had been doing proactively to deal with such content material and the way a lot of it was eliminated each month.

“We defined to them the whole technique of how, regardless of using the accessible mechanisms for content material evaluate, a few of it manages to flee the scrutiny of algorithms and machines. While we’re all the time engaged on bettering the method, a number of the content material will all the time must be flagged for takedown,” one other social media middleman government current on the assembly mentioned.

Last month, the I&B and IT ministries had flagged a number of handles and content material to social media platforms for takedown.

The IT ministry had recognized 73 Twitter handles, 4 YouTube channels and one sport on Instagram for faux and incitement content material, and requested the respective social media intermediaries to droop them.

The I&B ministry had issued orders to ban 35 extra channels on YouTube after receiving intelligence inputs that these channel house owners had been based mostly in Pakistan and had been concerned in spreading “anti-India fake news in a coordinated manner over digital media”.

Officials mentioned that executives from all social media firms current on the assembly agreed that the content material flagged by the 2 ministries had been certainly illegal, and due to this fact had been taken down swiftly.

In February 2021, the MeitY had notified guidelines and pointers to carry social media and over-the-top (OTT) content material platforms extra accountable for the “misuse and abuse” of the content material hosted on their platforms.

As part of the rules, the IT ministry had requested all social media firms to nominate an in-house grievance officer whose title and phone particulars had been to be shared with the ministry, a resident grievance officer who ought to have an workplace in India and be an Indian passport-holding citizen in addition to a chief compliance officer who needs to be current in India and guarantee compliance with the platform’s compliance with the IT Act and the principles.

Monthly compliance studies on the complaints acquired, the motion taken and the redressal for such complaints additionally needed to be revealed by the intermediaries, as per the principles notified in February 2021.

While the IT ministry had then additionally mentioned that social media intermediaries who had been primarily within the enterprise of offering peer-to-peer messaging service must disclose the primary originator of any message when requested, social media intermediaries, together with WhatsApp, challenged this rule earlier than a number of High Courts.

The guidelines had been notified following an intense back-and-forth between the IT ministry and Twitter in January and February, 2021.

On January 31, amidst then ongoing farmer protests on the border of Delhi, the IT ministry had despatched Twitter a listing of 257 accounts, asking it to dam their entry from the platform and from India. The IT ministry had used its emergency powers underneath Section 69 of the Information Technology Act.

Although Twitter had initially complied with the order, it later unblocked a number of the accounts, citing freedom of speech on its platform. The transfer didn’t sit nicely with the IT ministry which had then mentioned that the platform shouldn’t have assumed “the role of a court and justify non-compliance”.