Govt may ask social media platforms to explain low compliance to notices

The central government might ask Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies to explain their alleged poor compliance to legal notices served in India.

The IT ministry is arranging reports of actions taken by significant social media intermediaries (SSMIs), both voluntarily and in response to official notices in India as well as other nations for a detailed review.

According to the Indian government guidelines, companies with more than 5 million registered users are regarded as SSMIs. The ministry is expected to discuss the issue with SSMIs in the next fortnightly meeting.

While a Twitter spokesperson said the platform had no comments to offer, a Meta representative said, “The company’s community standards outline what is and is not allowed on our platform. If the content violates our Community Standards, we remove it from our platform.”

According to Meta, India is its largest market with more than 400 million users. Twitter has nearly 24 million users in the nation, which is 10 percent of the platform’s global user base of 330 million active users. From July 2021 to December 2021, Facebook received 50,382 requests from various governments in India, of which 47,123 were legal. The company had complied with 64 percent of these requests.