Govt to set up committees for social media content moderation complaints

The Centre has notified the rules under which it will set up appellate panels to redress grievances that users may have against decisions of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook on hosting disputable content. The three-member Grievance Appellate Committees will be set up in three months and shall try to resolve the issue within 30 days.

In the new rules, the government has added objectionable religious content (with intent to incite violence) along with pornography, trademark infringements, fake information and things that could be a threat to the sovereignty of the nation that users can flag to social media platforms. Their decisions on such flags can be challenged before the grievance committees.

IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw tweeted: “Empowering users. Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC) has been introduced for hearing appeals against decisions of Grievance Officer appointed by the intermediary. Privacy policy and user agreements of intermediary to be made available in the Eight Schedule Indian languages.”

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the junior minister for electronics and information technology (Meity), said, “These IT rules are the next step to realising our goals of an open, safe and trusted, accountable internet and also marks a new partnership between government and internet intermediaries in making and keeping our Interest safe and trusted for all Indians.”

On the contrary, the Internet Freedom Foundation stated that the provisions establishing the so-called grievance appellate committees are essentially a government censorship body that would hear appeals against the decisions of social media platforms to remove content or not, thus making bureaucrats arbiters of our online free speech.

It further added, “This will incentivise platforms to remove/suppress any speech unpalatable to the government or those exerting political pressure and increase government control and power since the government will be effectively able to also decide what content must be displayed by platforms. We urge for a thoughtful consideration by Meity to formulate a rights-respecting approach towards platform regulation. A step in that direction would be to withdraw IT Rules, 2021 in its entirety.”