India, the government is taking over the internet

“Nearly everyone in the industry, at least in India, thought the government would miss the three-month deadline”anonymously stated a Wired UK a person familiar with the internal discussions of a Western social media platform. Tech platforms expected more time to adjust to the new rules: “There was not enough consultation and no one in the industry was ready for such a fundamental change in their operations in India”added the anonymous source.

But as the deadline approached, the government hinted it would not budge. Google and Meta complied fast, while Twitter missed deadlineleading the Indian government has declare that the company had temporarily lost its status as an intermediary, thus becoming responsible for the contents published on its platform. At least two lawsuits were filed against Twitter India chief Manish Maheshwari during that time causes relating to content posted on the service, and an attorney presented a complaint against the company for “spread of hate“.

Eventually Twitter hired the three local managers as required by the new regulations, prompting the government to restore the intermediary status of the platform. Later, the company released a transparency report showing how the Indian government has submitted nearly 4,000 takedown requests to Twitter between July and December 2021. As of May 2021, the police have raided the Twitter offices in Delhi and Gurgaon, after the company applied the label “manipulated media” to a tweet from a politician of the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The Indian government is also clashed with Meta. The new rules allow authorities to ask messaging platforms to identify the author of any messagean arrangement incompatible with WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, which it has sued the government to challenge the law (the lawsuit is still pending).

Social media platforms have branded some of the other measures of the new Indian regulation as unfeasible. One of the provisions provides, for example, that intermediaries respond to user complaints within 24 hours and resolve them in the following 15 days; social media platforms are then required to remove some “controversial” content within 72 hours of reporting (mass reporting of content judged to be harmful is a common tactic in India).

New rules coming

Although the government has declared that the rules launched in 2021 for platforms were designed to “empowering ordinary social media users” and stop the circulation of dangerous content and financial fraud, Banerjee believes that the crackdown serves more to reassert control over online media, which have proliferated in India in recent years. India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not respond to a request for comment from Wired UK for this article.