In February 2021, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had alerted the social media platforms of complying the new code of ethics and guidelines which is reportedly to safeguard the users data, to eliminate the social media abusing culture including few other major concerns. The center had given all the foreign based tech giants three-months of period to regulate their digital platforms and to comply with the set of rules. The given period ends on Wednesday i.e May 25. Meaning these firms would have to adhere to the new rules from May 26 onward. Surprisingly, none of the top social media firms (including Facebook, Twitter and others) have agreed to comply with the set of new rules. This has sparked a talk whether if these apps will be blocked if they don’t adhere to new rules.
There are reports, that if these companies fail to comply with the new set of rules, they will be blocked from the use of Indian audience. Also, by not complying to the new rules by government of India, these platforms may lose their status and protection as intermediaries becoming liable for criminal actions as per existing laws of India.
For the unversed, the Indian government recently imposed complete ban on 43 mobile applications. Many of these apps were China based. The ban was imposed under the section 69A of the IT Act. Earlier, the government first had banned 59 mobile apps in June 2020 and later extended the ban to 118 more apps in September 2020, which took the totals number of banned apps to 177 count.
As per the new rules, social media platforms or news platforms have to appoint India-based compliance officials, giving their names and contact addresses in India, complaint resolutions, monitoring of objectionable content, compliance reports and removal of objectionable content.
These new rules have also been provisioned to set up an oversight mechanism by the government, which includes a committee with representatives from the Ministries of Defense, External Affairs, Home, I&B, Law, IT and Women and Child Development.
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