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Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said that the amendments to the IT rules made on Friday are aimed at making Internet ‘safe’ for Indians.
India as a nation continues to favour a self-regulatory body for social media content disputes despite a lack of consensus among Big Tech companies to form a joint appeals panel, said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Information Technology, during a press briefing on Saturday.
The government’s move is seen as the latest attempt to regulate Big Tech firms through policy changes which have often irked companies that complain about excessive compliance burden.
“India under PM Narendra Modi is a trustee of rights of its citizens & Digital Nagriks,” Chandrasekhar had stated earlier. According to Chandrasekhar, “These Rules mark new partnership between the Government & Intermediaries in making & keeping our Internet Safe & Trusted for all Indians.”
Chandrasekhar also said that the formation of a government panel “is a signal to them (social media companies) that they need to up their game.”
On Friday, the central government stated that it would set up an appeals panel as concerned users have no source to help in a difficult situation if they objected to moderation decisions of social media companies such as Meta, Twitter or Google.
This update comes after New Delhi’s statement in June that it could scrap the proposal if the companies themselves banded together to form a self-regulatory body. However, they failed to reach a consensus — Google was opposed to external reviews, while Meta and Twitter favoured self-regulation fearing government overreach.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Information Technology, in an interview, said that the centre could still consider industry self-regulation as government-led reviews “is not something that we want to spend a lot of time doing”.
Chandrasekhar also added that such a body “cannot be a cozy club of industry people” and should have consumer and government representation. He also said that the current system of in-house grievance redressal at tech companies was “broken”.
In past, Twitter has faced a backlash after it blocked accounts of influential Indians, including politicians, citing violation of its policies.
Moreover, the microblogging platform had also locked horns with the centre last year as it declined to fully comply with orders to take down accounts, which as per the government were spreading misinformation.
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