KOCHI: The High Court has held that the creator or administrator (admin) of a WhatsApp group is not criminally liable for offensive content posted by a group member. The court pointed out that there is no law by which an admin of any messaging service can be held liable for such posts.
“In the absence of a special penal law creating vicarious liability, an admin of a WhatsApp group cannot be held liable for the objectionable post by a group member,” observed the court.
The court issued the order while quashing a criminal case against Manual, a resident of Cherthala. The petitioner had created a WhatsApp group called ‘FRIENDS’, and made two other persons ‘admins’, alongside himself.
One of them posted a porn video depicting children engaged in a sexually explicit act. The Ernakulam city police registered a case against Manual under sections of the Information Technology Act and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (Pocso). He was arraigned as a co-accused merely in his capacity as the creator or administrator of the group.
The HC said: “A WhatsApp admin cannot be an intermediary under the IT Act. He does not receive or transmit any record or provide any service with respect to such record. There is no master-servant or a principal-agent relationship between the admin of a WhatsApp group and its members. It goes against basic principles of law to hold an admin liable for a post published by someone else. As has been held by both the Bombay and Delhi High Courts, the only privilege enjoyed by the admin of a WhatsApp group over other members is that he can either add or delete any of the members from the group.”