Social Media Intermediaries Need To Follow India’s Rules: MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Tuesday (July 5) reiterated that all social media intermediaries’ will have to abide by the country’s rules.

In a tweet, Chandrasekhar said while the intermediaries have the right to seek judicial review, they would have to follow the rules. 

“In India, all incldng foreign Internet intermediaries/platforms have right to court n judicial review,” wrote Chandrasekhar in his tweet. “But equally ALL intermediary/platforms operating here, have unambiguous obligation to comply with our laws n rules.”

The minister’s tweet came hours after news agency Reuters reported that social media giant Twitter has taken the Indian government to court seeking to overturn some of its content takedown orders under IT Rules, 2021.

Twitter has reportedly asked for judicial review of the content removal orders saying some of the orders fell short of the procedural requirements under India’s IT Act. The microblogging platform’s action came on the back of the IT Ministry’s notice to it alleging that it had failed to comply with the IT Rules, 2021. 

The ministry had asked Twitter to comply with the rules by July 4, or lose its intermediary status.

However, Chandrasekhar later shared a news report about Twitter complying with the ministry’s notice. 

The IT Rules (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code), 2021 for social media apps, online news portals, news aggregators and OTT platforms came into effect on May 26, 2021. It aims to provide an “open, safe and trusted and accountable” internet for all Indian users. 

Twitter has been publishing its monthly transparency reports under the IT Rules, 2021. The platform banned over 46,000 accounts in India between April 26, 2022 and May 25, 2022, as per the latest report.

Chandrasekhar has always been vocal about the need for the companies to follow the rules laid down by the government. Earlier, when new directives for virtual private network (VPN) service providers were introduced and there was criticism around data collection by the government, Chandrasekhar made it clear that the government would go ahead with the rules. 

He had asked VPN service providers to follow the latest directions issued by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) or terminate their business in India. As the course followed, several foreign VPN service providers including ExpressVPN, Surfshark, and NordVPN exited India.

Meanwhile, the government is planning amendments to IT Rules, 2021, and the draft amendments are already out in public.

Several legal experts earlier told Inc42 that the proposed rules, including forming a separate Grievance Appellate Committee for overseeing social media content, might be problematic in different ways.

Meanwhile, the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) submitted its comments on the proposed draft amendment to the IT Rules, 2021 to the IT ministry on July 4.

“The Draft amendment proposed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) significantly increases the compliance burden of social media intermediaries and seeks to create an appellate body which will essentially make the Union Government arbiters of online speech,” said Tejasi Panjiar, Associate Policy Counsel, IFF.

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