News & Analysis

Social Media Grievance Panel on the anvil 

Given the challenges that social media users and providers are facing, the step aims at providing an alternative dispute resolution mechanism

The federal government would soon set up one or more centrally appointed grievance appellate committees to give users of social media platforms and their providers an alternative to seeking legal recourse from courts in case of complaints. The committees would come up within three months after the new IT Rules of 2021 are notified. 

The final draft of the proposed changes to the IT Rules of 2021 were first released for public consultation in June. A report in the ET suggests that these would be notified by the government over the next few days. 

 

Some strict timeframes being set

The rule changes have prescribed shorter timelines of 24 hours for acting upon sensitive content related matters whereby intermediaries would be instructed about the rights accorded to all citizens under the Constitutions, including those in Articles 14, 19 and 21. The rule changes also provide relief to the platforms around the issue of due diligence on user-generated content. 

The final draft, the committee would be a three-member affair and comprise a chairman and two full-time members appointed by the central government. Of the three, one will be ex-officio while the other will be independent members. It provides for anyone not happy with the grievance officer’s actions to appeal the decision within 30 days. 

 

Self-regulation idea does not work

Readers would recall that the government had ignored the proposal of the industry to create a self-regulatory body. This was largely due to the fact that the powers that be felt the platforms were not responding to user grievances within a prescribed time frame. On their part, platform owners had opposed government committees, which they felt wouldn’t act independently. 

According to the new set of rules, the committees would make every effort to resolve all appeals within a period of thirty days. Moreover, they would also be at liberty to seek assistance from any person or persons with requisite qualifications, experience and expertise in the subject. As of now it isn’t clear what these qualifications are. 

Though the government did not relent on the appointment of these committees as opposed to making it a self-regulatory body, they have said that social media intermediaries would make all efforts to tell users that they cannot host, display, upload, modify or publish content that can be described as obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, and invades others’ privacy or violates other laws of the country. 

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