India needs legislation to hold platforms liable for online harms: IT for Change

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Claiming that self-regulation has not yielded results in making platforms safe spaces for women and marginalised groups, Bengaluru-based IT for Change, a non-governmental organisation working on internet governance, gender, and digital justice, has said that a law should be brought in to hold social media platforms liable for online harm.

This comes at a time when the Union government is proposing a separate committee to give users an avenue to appeal decisions made by grievance redressal officers of intermediaries like Twitter, Google, Meta, and others.

The government has also said that it is open to the establishment of an industry-formed self-regulatory body to deal with such appeals. However, a recent Reuters report said that Google has opposed the creation of such a body as it could reinstate content, even if it violated Google’s internal policies.

“What is required is legislation to hold platforms liable for online harms (with differential compliance obligations depending on the size of the platform) and the creation of mechanisms to oversee platform governance,” IT for Change said in a report titled ‘Profitable Provocations’.

The report is a study of abuse and misogynistic trolling on Twitter directed at Indian women in public-political life. The report collected 30,460 mentions directed at women in politics and political commentary collected from their public profiles.

The report found that the majority of the hateful content directed at women were on the grounds of religion, followed by ‘abuse’, ‘misogyny’, ‘sexualised references’, and so on.

Moneycontrol has reached out to Twitter for comments in this regard, and the post will be updated when we receive a response.

Keeping these findings in context, IT for Change recommended an independent and autonomous regulatory authority with discretionary powers to oversee social media regulation in India.

“The moderation of dangerous, hateful, and misogynistic content by platforms would fall under the remit of this proposed regulatory authority. This would allow online gender-based violence on social media platforms to be tackled through a combination of compliance and deterrence-based regulatory strategies,” the report read.