New Delhi: While answering a question in Parliament during question hour in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, November 27, Union Minister of Information & Broadcasting, Railways, and Electronics & IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, spoke of further tightening existing laws governing social media and OTT platforms.
He said, “We are living in the era of social media and OTT platforms. However, the democratic institutions and traditional forms of the press that once relied on editorial checks to ensure accountability and correctness of content, have seen these checks diminish over time.”
As per the PIB release on the matter, he noted that due to the absence of such editorial oversight, social media has become a platform for freedom of press on one hand, but on the other hand, it has also become a space for uncontrolled expression, which often includes vulgar content.
Vaishnaw made a cultural point, used often by the Modi government to shut down rights of expression enshrined in the Indian Constitution’s fundamental rights.
“The cultural sensitivities of India vastly differ from those of the regions where these platforms were created. This makes it imperative for India to make existing laws more stricter and he urged everyone to come to a consensus on this matter.”
He was responding to a question by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Arun Govil (who incidentally owes his profile mostly to having played the role of Lord Ram in Ramayana which was screened on Doordarshan in the 1980s) on whether the government intends to make laws more stringent to curb misuse of digital platforms.
The Minister said the Parliamentary Standing Committee should take this up as a priority.
“There should be societal consensus on it, along with stricter laws to address this challenge” he said.
The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT Rules, 2021) under the Information Technology Act, 2000 have mandated a Code of Ethics for OTT platforms. Publishers are required not to transmit any content which is prohibited by law and to undertake age-based classification of content into five categories, based on general guidelines provided in the Schedule to the Rules, reports Bar and Bench.
The Code also mandates that OTT platforms provide for adequate safeguards and ensure only age-inappropriate content makes its way to children.
The IT Rules, 2021 make it obligatory for platforms like YouTube and Facebook to make reasonable efforts to ensure that their users do not “host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, etc. any information which is obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, invasive of another’s privacy, insulting or harassing on the basis of gender, racially or ethnically objectionable, or that is harmful to children.”
In February 2021, the government formally tightened its control over digital and OTT platforms with a three-tier mechanism that it termed as a “soft-touch regulatory architecture”. The first two tiers put in place a system of self-regulation, the crucial third calls for an oversight mechanism managed by central government bureaucrats, something that has come under severe criticism, for being a means of controlling free speech and expression.
In August, 2023, Internet freedom Foundation submitted a detailed response to the union government’s proposal to regulate OTT content, saying that it was “apprehensive of the approach of selective banning of OTT services, given its ad-hoc, ambiguous, and impractical application, and the negative consequences it may have of user choice and freedom.” You can read the submission here.
