IT ministry officials set to meet social media firms after August 13

Things on the government-social media spat seem to have cooled down a bit since IT Minister Aswini Vaishnaw took charge days after Modi cabinet expansion in July. The emphasis, reports suggest, is no more on sending “angry notices.”

Senior executives from social media intermediaries such as Facebook, Twitter and Google are due to meet Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) officials after the Parliament’s monsoon session ends on August 13, The Indian Express reported.

Social media intermediaries are expected to point out “a lack of an SOP (standard operating procedure)” on the newly enacted Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, known as the IT Rules 2021. The intermediaries are also likely to list out operational problems they have faced over the new rules. They also plan to seek more clarity on certain issues such as monthly reports.

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The proposed meetings will be a far cry from multiple exchanges of notices and letters between the IT ministry and the intermediaries. The interaction with the new IT minister will be the first since he took over from Ravi Shankar Prasad who had locked horns with Twitter since early this year when Twitter refused to fully comply with the IT ministry orders asking the platform to limit access to certain content in India.

Appointment of executives in the role of a chief compliance officer, a resident grievance officer and a nodal contact person or the requirement of tracking the first originator of a message on instant messaging platforms kept the ministry and the intermediaries on edge.

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The Express quoted sources as saying that though some of the intermediaries are yet to fully comply with the guidelines mentioned in the IT Rules, there are no warnings to comply immediately or face action.

“Our intent was always to comply with the guidelines. But whenever any new rules or law comes in, there will always be some operational and logistical issues. More than three-fourth of our India team was down with COVID during March-June this year. We had no option but to push everything back,” an executive of a social media intermediaries said.