New Delhi: The Union government has notified the Press Information Bureau’s fact-check arm as the designated ‘fact-checking unit’ under the amended Information Technology Rules of 2023.
The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2023, empowers a fact-checking unit to flag information related to the Union government which it deems is false, fake or misleading. Multiple analysts have compared it to a death knell on press freedom.
The notification comes a month before the Lok Sabha elections, in what the Internet Freedom Foundation foresees is a move that “could vastly affect the nature of free speech on the internet as it holds the potential to be (mis)used for proactive censorship, most importantly in the context of dissent.”
The Hindu has reported that last week, the PIB fact-check unit noted that an Al Jazeera article calling the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 “anti-Muslim,” was fake’ but that it presented “two rejoinders to claims that the Al Jazeera article never made in the first place.”
The notification also comes a day before the Supreme Court is to hear a batch of petitions challenging the 2023 IT Rules and its fact-checking unit clause.
Earlier this month, the Bombay high court had said that there will be no interim stay on the Union government notifying the fact-checking unit, a month after a two-judge bench delivered a split verdict on the validity of the specific rule dealing with said unit.
