NEW DELHI: The government wants to enhance its oversight across social media platforms by taking various subsidiary steps, besides working to bring relevant laws, Union IT and Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told Rajya Sabha on Friday.
The objective is to make social media platforms more “accountable” for any slanderous content posted on them. The minister in reply to a querstion, asked Opposition members to submit their phones and cooperate in the investigation to find the truth over Apple allegedly sending a message to them about “state-sponsored hackers” trying to attack their iPhones.
In reply to another query, he said the government is amending “intermediary rules” for social media to tackle misinformation and deepfakes. “We are amending the intermediary rules. The reason is deepfake issues have come up in a very big way,” Vaishnaw informed the House.
Expressing serious concern, he further said, “With the spread of misinformation and deep fakes, we must take strict and urgent action to ensure that this menace is removed. We are amending the intermediary rules. We are coming up with provisions where there is significant responsibility lying with the social media platforms so that they can detect deepfakes and misinformation to enable early action,” he said.
Most social media platforms, he said, are already moderating a lot of content. These are sites that are no longer a platform that they were 30 years back, he said. “The entire global regulatory body is reaching a kind of a consensus on the matter”, he said, urging the members to develop common ground on the need for more responsibility from social media portals.
“We are creating an institutional framework for the digital economy. That has three parts – the first is a new set of legislations,” he said, adding that the telecom bill and the personal digital data protection bill, passed by the House are to be effective,” he said.
Replying to Congress’ Rajeev Shukla on the misuse of social media and the difficulty one faces in getting removed from slanderous posts, he reiterated that social media platforms have to take responsibility.