New Delhi: Social networking sites Facebook, photo and video sharing platform Instagram, and Indian micro-blogging platform Koo are able to respond to all the incidents reported to them by Indian users and authorities, others such as WhatsApp and Twitter have also appointed officers but were not able to redress all the incidents reported to them, showed the latest data shared in the Parliament.
In response to a question by the BJP's Rajya Sabha member Sushil Kumar Modi, Information and Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw informed the House about the incidents reported to large social media companies and steps taken by them to resolve those incidents.
IT Minister Vaishnaw informed the House that significant social media intermediaries, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, India's micro-blogging platform Koo, Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp, and micro-blogging platform Twitter have appointed grievance redressal officers as per the new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
Under the new rules, large social media intermediaries having 5 million or more users are required to publish compliance reports periodically and companies like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube and WhatsApp have already published their first compliance reports. In his reply, Vaishnaw shared the information given by six platforms – Facebook which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp and the Mark Zuckerberg owned platform shared the grievance redressal report about all three platforms.
According to the data shared by the minister, between May 15 to June 15, Facebook India received 646 complaints. Indian Grievance mechanism and was able to respond in all the cases. Similarly, the company's other platform Instagram received 36 grievances and was able to respond to all of them. Google-owned video-sharing platform YouTube received 27,762 complaints during the one-month reporting period in April this year and carried out 59,350 removal actions.
India based micro-blogging platform Koo, which is seen as a rival to US giant Twitter, received 5,502 complaints in June this year and issues through the user community and other means and was able to respond to all of them. Koo, as per the information given by the government, carried out 1,253 contents and carried out other actions such as overlay, blurring, ignore and warn in 4,249 other cases, taking the total number of incidents to 100%.
Facebook-owned short-messaging platform WhatsApp received 345 complaints between May 15 to June 15 this year and took action against 63 accounts, which is less than 20%. However, it is not clear from the minister’s reply whether WhatsApp was able to respond in all 345 cases or not. Jack Dorsey owned Twitter, which sparred with the government over new IT rules, delayed the appointment of its grievance redressal officer and as a result, its compliance period is from May 26 to June 25.
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Twitter received 38 complaints during the period through its Grievance Officer - India channel and removed 133 URLs. Vaishnaw informed the Rajya Sabha members that these significant social media platforms have also taken proactive actions on certain content on their platform based on the violation of their policies.
The minister said all the intermediaries operating in India are required to comply with the new I-T Rules, otherwise, they will be liable to lose their exemption under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act.
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No data about LinkedIn, others
Though IT minister Vaishnaw included some other platforms such as LinkedIn, Sharechat, Telegram, JioChat and MyGov in the list of significant media intermediaries (SSMIs) but details of their compliance report were non included in the government's reply in the Rajya Sabha.
