Explained: What the Centre said about framing stricter rules for social media companies

Replying to a question asked by Congress’ member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, Anand Sharma, Vaishnaw said that the government was open to even more strict social media rules if the house could build a consensus on it.

“I personally believe that for the protection of our citizens, we must make the rules stricter. At this point of time, we are working within the constitutional framework. The roles of the State and the Centre both have to be seen in perspective. We have to come forward as a society and create much more accountability for social media,” Vaishnaw said.

Replying to another question asked by BJP’s Rajya Sabha member Sushil Kumar Modi who asked what action had been taken against the sites which had put up defamatory pictures of Muslim women and tried to auction them off, Vaishnaw said that protecting the dignity of woman online was a fundamental construct, and that there would be no compromise on it.

“It is our commitment. Whatever information came to us, we immediately acted upon it,” the minister said, adding that the opposition alleged that whenever the government tried to take steps to make social media more accountable, it was the opposition which alleged that the freedom of speech was being taken away.

What action did the government take on the websites that defamed women?

Following complains that a website had uploaded pictures of Muslim women and tried to defame them by putting them up for sale, the IT ministry had asked the Indian Computer Emergency Response System (Cert-In), the nodal agency for monitoring cyber security incidents and related threats to form “a high level committee” to probe the incident, and to coordinate with the cyber cells of state police forces.

The ministry had also written to code-hosting platform GitHub, asking it to block the websites in question. Following the complaints, all the accused in the case were arrested by teams of Mumbai and Delhi Police and have since remained in custody.

What are the rules and guidelines to make social media companies accountable?

In February last year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology as well as the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had notified rules and guidelines to hold social media and over-the-top (OTT) content platforms more accountable for the “misuse and abuse” of the content hosted on their platforms.

As part of the guidelines, the IT ministry had asked all social media companies to appoint an in-house grievance officer whose name and contact details were to be shared with the ministry, a resident grievance officer who should have an office in India and be an Indian passport-holding citizen as well as a chief compliance officer who should be present in India and ensure compliance with the platform’s compliance with the IT Act and the rules.

Monthly compliance reports on the complaints received, the action taken and the redressal for such complaints also had to be published by the intermediaries, as per the rules notified in February 2021.

While the IT ministry had then also said that social media intermediaries who were primarily in the business of peer-to-peer messaging service would have to disclose the first originator of a message and tell the same to the ministry when asked, social media intermediaries have challenged this rule before several high courts.

The rules for OTT platforms had then opted to follow a “soft-touch self-regulatory architecture” and called for online digital news disseminating agencies to self-categorise their content into one of the five age-based broad categories.

Newsletter | Click to get the day’s best explainers in your inbox