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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

02/11/22 04:25 AM IST

The amendments to the IT Rules, 2021

In News 
  • The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has notified amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT Rules, 2021).
  • It replaces decade-old rules regulating social media intermediaries (SMI) to make them more accountable towards providing open, safe and trusted internet.
New Amendments 
  • The new rules pave the way for the establishment of one or more Grievance Appellate Committees (GACs) within 3 months.
  • These committees will enable users of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to get recourse to settle complaints without depending on the judiciary.
  • The committee will have three members. One of them will be a government officer and the other two will be independent representatives.
Social Media Obligations 
  • SMIs are mandated to ensure that their users comply with the relevant rules of the social platform. Earlier, the rules only mandated SMIs to inform their users of the “rules and regulation, privacy policy and user agreement”.
  • The SMIs are required to make “reasonable” efforts to prevent prohibited content from being hosted in their platforms. They will be responsible for policing and moderating the content on their platform. This rule has been met with scepticism due to the subjectivity of the content’s nature and magnitude of information.
  • SMIs are required to remove information or communication links that belong to 6 prohibited categories of content within 72 hours after the complaint is raised. This will help stop the content from becoming viral and spreading across the world.
  • The SMIs are required to take reasonable measures to increase accessibility to their services to make them more inclusive. This is to strengthen inclusivity of the SMI ecosystem, making it accessible to persons with disabilities and those with diverse linguistic backgrounds. The new IT rules require the platforms to make available the “rules and regulations, privacy policy and user agreement” in all languages listed in the 8th schedule of the Indian constitution.
Grievance Appellate Committees (GAC)
  • The committee is styled as a three-member council out of which one member will be a government officer (holding the post ex officio) while the other two members will be independent representatives.
  • Users can file a complaint against the order of the grievance officer within 30 days.
  • Importantly, the GAC is required to adopt an online dispute resolution mechanism which will make it more accessible to the users.
  • It is unclear whether this is a compulsory tier of appeal or not, that is will the user have to approach the grievance appellate committee before approaching the court. 
  • IT Rules, 2021 do not provide any explicit power to the GAC to enforce its orders.
  • Lastly, if users can approach both the courts and the GAC parallelly, it could lead to conflicting decisions often undermining the impartiality and merit of one institution or the other.
Significance 
  • First, there was a need to ensure that the interests and constitutional rights of netizens are not being contravened by big tech platforms,
  • second, to strengthen the grievance redressal framework in the Rules, and
  • third, that compliance with these should not impact early stage Indian start-ups.
  • The first category involved placing additional obligations on the SMIs to ensure better protection of user interests while the second category involved the institution of an appellate mechanism for grievance redressal.
Source- The Hindu 

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