Centre sets up three grievance committees to take up user complaints against social media platforms

The proposal has previously drawn criticism over fears that government appointed panels will be able to dictate content-moderation decisions taken by social media firms.

The first panel will be chaired by the chief executive officer of the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre under the Ministry of Home Affairs. Retired Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Ashutosh Shukla and Punjab National Bank’s (PNB) former chief general manager and chief information officer Sunil Soni have been appointed as the whole-time members of the panel.

The second panel will be chaired by the joint secretary in charge of the Policy and Administration Division in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Indian Navy’s retired Commodore Sunil Kumar Gupta and Kavindra Sharma, the former vice-president (consulting) of L&T Infotech, have been appointed as the whole-time members of this panel.

The third panel will be chaired by Kavita Bhatia, a senior scientist at the Ministry of Electronics and IT. Former traffic service officer of the Indian Railways Sanjay Goel and former managing director and chief executive officer of IDBI Intech Krishnagiri Ragothamarao have been appointed as the whole-time members of the third panel.

Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar told The Sunday Express that the disputes the GACs will deal with are under two categories: “One is violation of law and rights of users including the right to free speech and privacy, and two, if there is any contractual dispute between a platform’s community guidelines and a user.”

“We will give the GACs around 30 days before they can start dealing with users’ appeals so that all platforms can start logging their grievances and responding to 100 per cent of the complaints that users raise, so that when there is an appeal that is filed by a user with the GACs, they can easily search for it and resolve it,” Chandrasekhar added.

Asked how the three GACs will segregate the complaints among each other, Chandrasekhar said that they will have to figure this out going forward. “Whether it would depend on volume of complaints or subject wise distribution. For example, on issues related to national security, it is best to have a GAC where there is Home Ministry representation or at least people with a capability to understand and deal with such issues. If it’s an issue related to child sexual abuse material, it is better to get in women and child development experts, or officials from the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR),” he said.

According to sources at the IT Ministry, the GACs will act also act as a layer of a tech-sector regulator that the ministry is expected to prescribe under the upcoming Digital India Bill, which is the successor to the Information Technology Act, 2000.

In October last year, the government notified that it will start the process of selecting GACs amid criticism from civil society activists who had raised concerns about the government’s involvement in the appeals process, and even as the government had initially said that it would be open to social media companies setting up a self regulatory body among themselves provided that the government found the body’s functioning satisfactory.

What the changes essentially mean is that in case a user is not satisfied with the content moderation decision taken by a social company’s grievance officer, they can appeal that decision before the proposed government-appointed appeals committee. The government’s initial proposal had stemmed from users’ complaints about being deplatformed, or being removed from a social media site, without companies giving them an adequate avenue of hearing.

GACs can also seek assistance from people who may have adequate expertise and experience in a subject matter while dealing with users’ appeals. The GACs will adopt an “online dispute resolution mechanism” where the entire appeal process, from its filing to the final decision, will be done online. Social media companies will also have to compile every order passed by the GACs and report them on their respective websites.

Any person aggrieved by a decision of the grievance officer of a social media intermediary will be allowed to file an appeal to the GAC within a period of thirty days. The GAC will have to deal with the appeal and resolve it within a month of the receipt of the appeal.

The government’s proposal to oversee content moderation and user grievance decisions taken by social media platforms had drawn the ire of civil society activists. For instance, the Delhi-based digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation, in a submission to MeitY in July, had said that the provision could “make the Central Government (rather than an independent judicial or a regulatory body) the arbiter of permissible speech on the internet. It would incentivise social media platforms to suppress any speech that may not be palatable to the government, public officials or those who can exert political pressure”.

The government had previously kept the option open for social media platforms to create a self regulatory body to handle user grievances, provided that the companies could prove their system was effective. Social media companies, along with industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), had chalked up contours of a self-regulatory mechanism in response to that. However, The Indian Express had earlier reported that while firms like Meta and Twitter had supported the self regulatory body, Snap and Google had opposed certain contours of it, flagging concerns over the potential inability to legally challenge any final content moderation decisions of a self-governing body, in addition to the difference in the moderation policies of different platforms.