New Delhi: The proposal to form a fact-check unit for identifying false, fake or misleading online content related to the business of the central government was in response to requests by social media intermediaries, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said Tuesday, adding that anyone who characterises the IT rules as being “arbitrary” has not read them.
He was speaking at the 2024 conclave of the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), an industry body for online news publishers.
The fact-check unit — proposed as part of an amendment to the government’s Information Technology (IT) rules last year — has drawn criticism as a potential portal for government censorship on online content.
However, Chandrasekhar refuted the allegation that the unit would lead to censorship, saying the government has not asked that the disputed content be taken down, and only wants it labelled as such.
Replying to a query on censorship concerns related to a government-mandated body deciding what content is right and what is wrong, the minister said it is a “misreading” and “misunderstanding” of the rules.
“There is nothing subjective about patently false (content),” he said. “If you say 1+1=3, that is patently false… even the fact-check unit (for which) a comedian went to the Bombay High Court and the court, in a split decision, has said that this needs to be referred to a third judge… intermediaries wanted help from the government in determining what is wrong and right about the government because no third party can determine (that, as) only the government has information for it,” he said.
When the intermediaries (social media companies) requested the government for help, Chandrasekhar added, “we said, OK, the government will volunteer a fact-check unit telling you what is right and wrong”.
Chandrasekhar said censorship is “when a government mandates without establishing any basis in law saying ‘take down this’. I don’t like this’.”
“This is not what we are doing,” he added. “We are saying very clearly (what) types of content are unlawful. If you’re a social media platform, you certainly should not have your user posting that content and if you continue to want to have a user anonymous, then you lend yourself to being prosecuted and your safe harbour drops.”
The safe harbour provision he was referring to is one that says intermediaries are not responsible for what third parties post on their platforms. For example, Facebook or X cannot be held responsible for what a user might post on them.
Chandrasekhar also sought to assuage concerns that certain IT rules are “arbitrary”.
“If you’ve read the rules, you will find that the rules are absolutely clear, very simple, very consistent guardrails to protect the consumer from harm,” he said.
The types of unlawful content included under the IT Act, he added, are unlawful under the criminal code as well.
“We are saying that there are categories of content that are unlawful under the law… just because you’re on the internet, that suddenly doesn’t become lawful,” he said. “And the internet certainly cannot become a space where the law does not reach… Those 11 pieces of content (11 categories under IT rules such as child porn etc) are unlawful under the criminal law. These are all prohibited under law in the real world and there cannot be an argument that it has to be permitted in the cyber world.”
The government, he said, is the trustee of protecting citizens’ fundamental rights and needs to establish legislative guardrails to ensure platforms are accountable for the correctness of the content that they put out there for consumers.
“Therefore, there is a responsibility that is cast on the platform to be doubly and triply sure that what consumers consume is really the truth and safe and trusted…” he added. “And that, in my opinion, is a shared goal for anybody who wants the Indian internet to be a robust, healthy, profitable, monetisable internet, rather than an internet that is toxic with content that is unsure and unverified. Nobody knows what the truth is…”
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Impact of AI
Asked about the impact of AI eating into content creation on digital content publishers, the minister said it is an important and almost existential question “about these platforms, especially generative AI platforms, scraping the internet and using publicly available content to train their models”.
He added that a case underway in the US — The New York Times versus Open AI — will be the defining case on what the rights of digital news platforms or individuals who have put out content are.
The case mentioned involves NYT suing Open AI and Microsoft over ChatGPT, a generative AI platform, saying it has scraped information from the internet — including content that belonged to NYT — for free and in violation of content creators’ rights.
Chandrasekhar’s personal view, he said, is that the model — where content put out in the public domain is used to train a model and then monetise that — is not tenable.
He added that the government is aware and concerned that there is a deep asymmetry in revenue sharing between those who create content and those who help the content creators monetise that content.
“From a policymaking point of view, we want the internet to be open,” he said. “We don’t want the internet or the monetisation on the internet to be controlled by just one or two or three companies… We don’t like monopolies, we don’t like duopolies.”
“Are we concerned about adtech (advertisement technology) monopolies and duopolies? Certainly. Do we have an answer for that? Certainly,” he added, saying the proposed “Digital India Act in its pre-consultation laid out this as one of the issues that we were going to deal with”.
“We are certainly going to have to deal with this very, very pronounced and very visible asymmetry between the small guy or even the medium to big guy in the Indian content creation ecosystem, and these big platforms that are, in a sense, the gatekeepers to monetising the content.”
He said that he was hopeful “after Prime Minister Narenda Modi resumes office” — referring to the upcoming general election — that this issue would be one of his priorities.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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