India’s New Social Media Rules Seen Echoing Globally

New Delhi: India’s new social media rules, notified last week, could be emulated by other countries such as the US, the UK and Australia, according to experts.

These countries have been pressing social networks to take responsibility for content on their platforms besides wanting tighter data-handling practices. Some experts said the rules infringe upon freedom of expression and privacy.

India is among the top three internet markets with close to 700 million users and its digital policy making is being followed closely. If companies accede to government diktats in India, they can’t refuse to do elsewhere, according to internet and legal experts. India’s ban of Chinese short video app TikTok had been cited in the US executive order seeking a similar halt on the Bytedance-owned company. In the past, India’s demand for traceability had also found resonance in countries such as the US, the UK and Australia.

The new Intermediary Liability Rules mandate social media companies with over 5 million users in India to not just enable traceability of end-to-end encrypted messages, but also establish local offices with senior officials to deal with law enforcement and user grievances.

They also have to alter their interface to clearly distinguish verified users from others, apart from setting up automated tools for content filtration and informing users if their accounts have been blocked with explanations.

The new rules are part of a global shift following the mass shooting in New Zealand that was live-streamed by the gunman on Facebook and a US executive order to revisit a law that gave absolute immunity to social media platforms, said Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court advocate and cyber expert.

“The Indian rules act as a logical corollary to the event happening globally,” he said. “It’s the first concrete step taken by a big nation to have a decisive policy for intermediaries and their liabilities.”

Australia, which is pushing companies such as Google and Facebook to share revenue with news publishers, as well as the UK and the European Union will watch how India implements the new social media rules.

“Rules, like the present ones, help strengthen national interest and cyber sovereignty of countries, give governments much more control over how the data of their citizens is handled, apart from giving them a way to govern companies which are generating revenues from users from the country by having an establishment there and a grievance redressal mechanism,” Duggal said.

Social media companies with large user bases in the country will have to significantly alter their operating model to accommodate the new mandates from the Indian government under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, which came into force on February 25, as part of Section 79 of the Information Technology Act.

Messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Signal will likely have to dilute end-to-end encryption to trace the “first originator” of flagged messages.

Platforms like Facebook will also have to create a new interface for India, which will give users the option to verify users through authorised know-your-customer (KYC) processes and display a verification tag for those who seek this.

While WhatsApp will have to devise a means of showing the verification tag, Twitter will have to roll out the verified blue tick feature for everyone who wants it.

Some experts said the rules violate freedom of speech and expression and privacy.

“The open internet is fundamentally based on the principles of interoperability and common standards, which may begin to fragment under these rules,” said Udbhav Tiwari, public policy adviser at Mozilla. Some provisions, such as those enabling traceability of encrypted content and automated filtering, are fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encryption and will weaken protections that millions of users have come to rely on in their daily lives.

Large companies like WhatsApp are expected to resist breaking end-to-end encryption since it may set a global precedent. On Friday, ET reported that WhatsApp was evaluating “all options”, following the government’s mandate to trace the origin of contentious messages, and that the Facebook-owned app “will not bend” on the issue of user privacy.

“The rules will compel social media intermediaries to depart from their global practices to cater to Indian laws, thereby implicitly creating a rift between their global platform and the platform accessible in India,” said Akash Karmakar, partner at law firm Panag & Babu.

Significant social media intermediaries will also have to publish monthly blocking and compliance reports, apart from hiring large teams in India to adhere to mandates such as taking down content in 36 hours from government agencies and 24 hours in the case of users. They may also have to alter their technology architecture to build in automated tools to weed out content related to rape, child sexual abuse or conduct.

Duggal said India will have to come up with a robust execution mechanism since the “teeth are missing” as the rules are silent on the enforcement mechanism.

In 2019 after India started pushing for traceability of messages to curb fake news, US attorney general, UK home secretary, and Australia’s minister for home affairs wrote a joint letter to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg asking Facebook not to proceed with end-to-end encryption without ensuring a means for lawful access to protect the citizens.

The union minister for electronics and information technology had told ET then, “What I have been pushing for is being done by America, England, Australia and others…You have to do the decryption.”

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Source: ET

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