Govt Likely To Bring Social Media Grievance Appellate Committees In 90 Days

The government is planning to notify the final draft of the proposed changes to the IT Rules 2021 in the next few days. Within three months of the notification, the government will also form one or more centrally appointed Grievance Appellate Committees (GACs), The Economic Times reported.

One of the major reasons to introduce the GAC in the draft amendment to IT rules 2021 was to provide social media users a platform to settle complaints, rather than going to court against the decision of such platforms including Facebook and Twitter.

The three-person GAC will include a chairperson and two whole-time members appointed by the central government, according to the provisions in the final draft. Among these three members, one will be ex-officio and the other two will be independent members.

A social media user, who is dissatisfied with a decision of the grievance officer of an intermediary, will be able to appeal against the decision within a period of 30 days, as per the provisions of the draft.

In such situations, the aim of the GAC will be to resolve the issues within 30 days. If needed, the committees will be allowed to take assistance from any person or persons having the requisite qualifications, experience and expertise in the subject.

Moreover, the final rules also prescribe shorter timelines of 24 hours for taking action against sensitive content. The social media intermediaries have also been instructed to “respect all the rights accorded to the citizens under the Constitution, including in Articles 14, 19 and 21.”

Considerably, the government reportedly received approval from the legal affairs department for the draft’s final version. The legal affairs department had suggested certain corrections in the format of the rules. 

From when the GAC concept was introduced, the industry experts and tech giants such as  Meta and Twitter pushed against such grievance appellate committees. The companies also pushed for a self-regulated grievance appellate committee.

The government had notified the IT Rules (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code), 2021 for social media apps, online news portals, news aggregators and OTT platforms in February 2021. Earlier this year,  the government released draft amendments to the rules.