Congress to set up rapid response teams with focus on combating fake news

New Delhi, Sep 1 (PTI) The Congress is looking to set up rapid response teams comprising lawyers with a special focus on combating the menace of fake news and misinformation online.

The Congress' Law, Human Rights and RTI Department headed by Abhishek Singhvi held a meeting on Sunday at the AICC headquarters here and decided to focus on the fake news menace.

Speaking after the meeting, Singhvi said, "We are galvanizing and we had a very productive, a very comprehensive meeting. In the last five years, a number of complaints have been dealt with both Election Commission (EC) related and non-EC related. We want to focus especially on the role of the department in social media, where fake news is rampant."

"We are going to create rapid response teams. We are talking of a lot of other organised structural reforms. Decentralisation is a very major object right down to the district level," he said.

Singhvi said the department is also focusing on issues related to the upcoming assembly elections.

"So, all this was discussed in a very free, frank and open manner. We are so grateful that our senior colleagues are here, they gave very-very valuable inputs, so did our young colleagues. We will now organise them and slowly-slowly tick the boxes and start implementing them," he said.

Singhvi said that social media is a very important part of everything related to law.

"Today, fake news is just a small word for it. Today, all kinds of nonsense and false propaganda is spread on social media. I do not want to use a harsh word, you can call it garbage, it is spread there only with the hope that it will run for some time. So our team has already filed FIRs in the last three weeks. But this keeps happening, so we will form a team for it in a systematic manner," he said.

The meeting was also attended by Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh, Rajya Sabha MP Syed Naseer Hussain and AICC secretary Vineet Punia.

The department includes the likes of senior lawyers Salman Khurshid, KTS Tulsi and Vivek Tankha.

While Singhvi has been named the chairman of the department, the panel comprises Khurshid, Tankha, Tulsi, Harin Raval, Prashanto Sen, Devdatt Kamath and Vipul Maheshwari. The executive panel has Muhammad Ali Khan as its secretary. PTI