At a time when the Union government's decision to fact check content related to itself is being termed as being in 'violation of freedom of speech and expression', Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Rajeev Chandrasekhar on April 14 urged citizens to allow this proposed government-appointed fact check unit to demonstrate its performance and "earn respect" of social media platforms.
Chandrasekhar said this at a Twitter Spaces event, while responding to a query on the recent amendment to the Information Technology Rules 2021, that mandates that a government-appointed organisation will have the powers to identify any "false or misleading content relating to the government".
If intermediaries do not comply with the organisation's decision, they may lose their safe harbour status under Section 79 of the IT Act, 2000 or the aggrieved government department or ministry can sue the intermediary in a court of law.
Earning trust and credibility
"I think we should allow for this institution to demonstrate its performance and earn the credibility of the people that are going to depend on it," Chandrasekhar said.
"The government fact checking unit is something that needs to be able to earn the respect of the social media intermediaries and the social media intermediaries have to trust the judgment, findings, research of the fact checking unit," Chandrasekhar while responding to a query by Moneycontrol on whether the fact check unit will provide any reasoning behind its decisions.
It is important to note that in Twitter's case against the Union government regarding few of its blocking orders, one of the arguments that the platform had provided in their petition was that the blocking orders of the government did not contain reasoning to pull down content.
Why fact check unit cannot be outside government
While explaining why the proposed fact check unit can not be formed outside the government, Chandrasekhar said that information relating to the government would only be available with the concerned ministries or departments.
"It is unlikely that any entity outside the government will ever be able to have the complete information about the government. So they will never be in a position to fact check the government and be able to label something as right or wrong," he said.
"That is why it is almost inevitable that any entity that fact checks content about the government will have to be something with close deep links to government, because they are the only ones with the data and information," he explained.
On criticism
After the amendments to the IT Rules were notified on April 7, digital right groups such as Internet Freedom Foundation, Software Freedom Law Centre, and media groups such as Editors Guild of India have criticised the government for the same.
Comedian Kunal Kamra has sued the government in the Bombay HC saying that the IT Rules amendments violate the right to freedom of speech and expression under Article 19 (1)(a).
"Some people who are deliberately obfuscating this (effort to deny misinformation) and conflating this with a freedom of speech and "chilling effect" (sic), are doing a tremendous disservice to this fight against a real problem that is really causing havoc, that is really causing incitement of a kind...," Chandrasekhar said while talking about recent incidents including that of cricketer Arshdeep Singh who was subjected to trolling on social media platforms after he missed a catch during an India-Pakistan match.
When it comes to fact checking media reports, Chandrasekhar said, "If media misreports, viewers will have different routes of litigating against them. The IT Rules will not have any impact on it. However, if anyone posts that piece of news on social media, then the fact check unit will certainly label that content as false and direct the intermediary to pull it down," he explained.
Self regulatory body
Apart from the fact check unit that would decide upon government-related content, a group intermediaries have also sought MeitY's blessings for forming a self-regulatory organisation (SRO) that would fact-check online content not related to the government.
While talking about that, Chandrasekhar said, "The government has received a proposal from large social media intermediaries, where they want to create an Indian SRO that will in turn, be representing all the the fact checking ecosystem."
"And they will want to create a certifying mechanism transparently with criteria that has been agreed to by everybody to certify fact checkers in the future," he explained.
Chandrasekhar explained that this initiative with the government was in line to the line of thinking that misinformation combined with artificial intelligence and deep fakes, "poses a risk to democracy and to transparent functioning of democracy and governance".
In this regard, he also apprised listeners of the upcoming Digital India Bill, whose pre-consultation was taken up last month. There in, the government made it clear that the safe harbour provision of the IT Act 2000, that provides immunity to intermediaries from third party content on their platforms, will be conditional.
He informed that the bill would be released for consultation by the end of April, and that it will have guardrails for AI and other emerging technologies.
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