Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Nov.24: A parliamentary panel in India has urged that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook be treated as publishers and that a regulatory agency be established to oversee them, possibly exposing the corporations to additional liability for user-generated content.
The high-level group made the proposals while reviewing the 2019 personal data protection bill, which aims to protect consumers’ privacy by imposing rigorous rules on how firms like Alphabet’s Google and Amazon acquire, process, and store data.
According to sources, the panel is requesting stricter guidelines because present legislation considering these social media platforms as intermediaries do not go far enough in terms of control. They also claimed that the current provisions in the law on personal data protection are overly wide.
According to the sources, the committee proposed that a body be established to regulate the material, similar to the Press Council of India. They suggested that a method be established to hold social media platforms accountable for content posted by unverified accounts.
P.P. Chaudhary, the panel’s chairman and a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said the report’s recommendations will be delivered to parliament when it reconvenes on November 29. He refused to comment on the report’s contents.
If these ideas are included in the new bill and ratified by parliament, it might have a significant impact on how public and private enterprises operate in the world’s largest social media market. Offenses under this bill might result in fines of up to 4% of a social media company’s annual global revenue, similar to European Union penalties.
Similar emotions exist outside of India as well. From Washington to Brussels, lawmakers have considered taking action to hold social media firms like Facebook and Google accountable for the massive amounts of content created on their networks on a regular basis, a viewpoint that gained traction during the pandemic.
In India, these businesses have benefited from “safe harbour” status, which means they can’t be held accountable for user-generated content on their platform as long as they follow the Intermediary Guidelines, which were released earlier this year. This has included establishing offices in India, recruiting compliance officers, and complying with government orders to remove specific types of content deemed damaging.
