Will India Lose Facebook And Twitter?

Social media giants, Facebook, and Twitter social media giants have been put on notice by the Centre with a warning about their failure to comply with a set of guidelines that come into effect in two days. On February 25 2021, the government gave a three-month deadline to all social media platforms to comply with the rules the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MEITy) had laid out.

The rules include the appointment of officials for compliance, giving their name and coordinates, facilities for complaint resolution, compliance report, monitoring of and removal of objectionable content. Except for Koo, none of the social media intermediaries have appointed a chief compliance officer, a grievance officer, and a nodal contact person.

Last week, Koo declared it has fulfilled the requirements laid down by the government by revamping its terms of use, privacy policy, and community guidelines. Koo has close to six million users, making it a major social media platform.

The laidback attitude of social media companies to make these appointments in three months has not gone down well with the central government. With inaction over bigotry and abuses online and arbitrary suspensions of accounts on social media platforms, the users in India have been repeatedly complaining against social media giants like Twitter, Facebook, among others.

Facebook is working to implement operational processes and aims to comply with the provisions of the IT rules that come into effect from May 26. The comments assume significance as social media companies are facing the deadline of May 25 to comply with the new guidelines for digital platforms.

For some platforms, the standard reply has been that they will await instructions from their company headquarters in the US, who in turn on their own will have an "expert assessment" to take a view.

Social media companies will also have to publish a monthly compliance report disclosing details of complaints received and action taken, as also details of contents removed proactively. They will also be required to have a brick and mortar contact address in India published on their website or app, or both.