Last Updated on 25/02/2021 by Khushi
The Government in India announced on Thursday, stricter regulative rules for the social media platforms, digit news platforms and the streaming services. These regulations have brought about a number of challenges for the tech giants, many of which count on India as a significant region in terms of it’s potential users and customers.
The Justice Minister of India, Ravi Shankar Prasad stated in a press meeting that social media platforms will now need to comply with a regulation to acknowledge takedown requests within 24 hours, regarding any misleading content that tends to spread misinformation, is unlawful or any violent content. Alongside this, the concerned platform needs to deliver a complete redressal by the next 15 days.
Ravi Prasad said, “We don’t want to know the content, but firms need to be able to tell who was the first person who began spreading misinformation or other objectionable content.”
The firms are also needed to appoint compliance, resident grievances and nodal contact officers and their name along with the contact details with the authority. These platforms are also supposed to comply with the setup of a local office in India. The firms are supposed to publish a compliance report every month which will entail the number of requests they receive and their response on such requests. The platforms need to avail a voluntary option to users for verifying their accounts.
These newly applied regulations came as a follow up of Twitter’s most recent act of not agreeing to New Delhi’s orders amidst the farmer’s protests there. Even the Facebook owned social messaging platform WhatsApp denied to comply by traceability requests without making a compromise with the end to end encryption security for users.
The regulations act as a replacement of laws from 2011 and some significant firms will be given a duration of 3 months to comply with these while for the others it is effective immediately.
