The government of India came out with new rules for social media platforms earlier this year. The rules came into effect starting the last week of the previous month. To help users and the stakeholders understand the rules in a better manner, the Indian government is going to come out with Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and answer them.
According to a PTI report, the IT Ministry is currently working on the FAQs and will release the questions and answers in a matter of 2 weeks. There would be around 10 to 20 questions in the FAQs for people to understand.
New IT Rules Force Social Media Companies to Appoint Grievance Officers
The sole reason why the new IT rules were enforced was to make social media platforms accountable for all the wrong kind of content that’s being spread online. For the same, companies such as Facebook and Twitter were asked to comply with the new rules and appoint the required officers.
The new IT rules applied to any platform/company that had more than 50 lakh users. As per the new rules, the companies needed to appoint a grievance officer, a nodal officer, and a chief compliance officer. All of the officers should be mandatorily from the Indian landscape and their registered offices should also be in India.
With the enforcement of new rules, the social media platforms are asked to take down any content within 24 to 36 hours if it has been flagged as wrong for the platform (nudity/pornography).
It is worth noting that Twitter has still not complied with the new IT rules when companies such as Facebook already have. Due to non-compliance with the rules, Twitter has lost its ‘safe harbour’ in India.
This means that now the company will be legally liable for whatever content that’s on its platform. So if users of Twitter post any unlawful content, the platform will have to answer for it. The IT ministry isn’t happy with Twitter appointing a grievance officer that’s not from India. Twitter had said that it needed more time to comply with the rules. More importantly, Twitter believes that the new IT rules are a threat to the privacy and right of speech.
