GOI proposes removing posts on social media flagged as ‘fake’

In a recent move from the Government of India, a proposal has been drafted that will advise social media platforms to get rid of information that has been tagged as ‘false’ or ‘fake’ as per the new IT rules.

The move comes from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government which it will not allow any social media network to keep stories, posts, or other content that was identified as fake or false by the Press Information Bureau (PIB). It isn’t just PIB by any authority or agency that has been authorized by the government to fact-check that will be covered under the drafted proposal.

To give it more context, social media, and online intermediaries will have to get rid of information that has been flagged as such. It goes as far as disallowing any users to host, display, modify, upload, publish, transmit, update, store or share such kind of information.

In a previous action by the Government of India, it had blocked 104 YouTube channels, four Facebook accounts, 45 videos, Twitter handles, and six websites that were dealing with the spreading of misinformation threatening national security at large. The information was revealed by Union Minister Anurag Thakur in Rajya Sabha where he explained that the Season 69A of the Information Technology Act was invoked to block access to content threatening the sovereignty of the country.

As per the reports, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in India issued directives to block 1,643 user-generated URLs between 2021 to October 2022 which gives just how aggressively the government is working towards getting rid of such information from the public domain.

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