The Economic Times daily newspaper is available online now.

    MeitY may allow more time to spike toxic online content

    Synopsis

    Under new guidelines in the works, social media firms may get 36 hours to axe unlawful content

    getty-imagesGetty Images
    NEW DELHI: The government may give internet and social media companies more time – up to 36 hours – under the intermediary guidelines to remove or disable access to unlawful content on their platforms.

    According to the Information Technology Intermediaries Guidelines (Amendment) Rules released in December, which are currently being finalised, the ministry of electronics and IT had proposed that such companies would have to provide information to any government agency, including tracing the origin of messages, within 72 hours and remove the content within 24 hours.

    Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill Courses

    Offering CollegeCourseWebsite
    MITMIT Technology Leadership and InnovationVisit
    IIM KozhikodeIIMK Advanced Data Science For ManagersVisit
    Indian School of BusinessISB Professional Certificate in Product ManagementVisit
    The time to disable access or remove content is being increased to 36 hours, a senior government official told ET. “This is being done to bring it at par with the current provisions under the IT Act,” the official said.

    The government is also looking to tighten a controversial clause that required companies to build “automated tools” to proactively identify and remove unlawful content, which had sparked censorship fears among social media companies by defining what constitutes unlawful content.

    “In the Prajwala case, the Supreme Court had already directed that content related to rape, gangrape and child pornography has to be removed. We are just adding terrorism to the definition of unlawful content, which was very wide earlier, so that companies can build algorithms to filter out such content,” the official said.

    The Supreme Court, in a judgment passed in December 2018 on a petition filed by NGO Prajwala, had asked the government to frame guidelines and implement them within two weeks “so as to eliminate child pornography, rape and gangrape imageries, videos and sites in content-hosting platforms and other applications.”

    Narrowing of the definition is expected to reduce ambiguity and assuage the concerns of social media companies, which had argued that they were only intermediaries hosting user-generated content on their platforms and building such tools or algorithms would lead to censorship.

    “It’s good that the government is trying to clarify,” said Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court advocate and cyber security expert. “We should learn from the backlash such measures are creating in countries such as Australia and must make sure we don’t walk that path.”

    The government official said this clause will not apply to all intermediaries such as internet service providers and cloud service providers, as was feared earlier, and instead will be “applicable only wherever possible.”

    “It can’t be everybody – it will be applied only wherever applicable. It can’t be for companies such as Amazon Web Services, which hosts content of social media companies. They just have to make sure that their users know that this kind of content cannot be posted and they should take measures to ensure it,” the official said.

    However, Duggal said the intermediary guidelines should be “beefed up” to give users the option to complain directly to companies.

    “Not everyone has the resources to approach a court or a government body. You have to give people a right to complain, given the speed with which content spreads with today’s technology advancement,” Duggal said.

    Originally, under the IT rules notified in 2011, companies had to act within 36 hours of receiving a written complaint from a person and work with the user to disable content. This was struck down by the Supreme Court. The rule was then amended to mandate that service providers will act within 36 hours only upon receiving an order from a court or government agency.

    The Economic Times

    Stories you might be interested in