‘New Rules Protect Rights Of Users, Were Framed Because Of Social Media Giants' Refusal To Do So'

IT and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has been in the thick of things as the new guidelines for social media became a flashpoint for a showdown between the government and Twitter and WhatsApp over issues of privacy and free speech. He speaks to Pankaj Doval and Sidhartha on why the rules are not a bid to gag dissenting opinion but rather an attempt to protect the rights of social media users and ensure accountability from Big Tech. Excerpts from the interview:

- Pankaj Doval and Sidhartha

There is an impression that the government is playing nanny to social media. Why is it so, and why are social media companies angry with the government?

I repudiate this question. The core issue is that these guidelines didn’t spring up suddenly. First, there are two Supreme Court judgements — the Prajwala case of 2018 regarding child pornography and the September 2019 case of Facebook versus the Union of India. In the second case, Supreme Court said that it is imperative that there is a properly-framed regime to find out the persons, institutions, and bodies who are the originators of such content messages… it may be necessary to get such information from the intermediaries. Also, in 2018, there was a debate in the Rajya Sabha on fake news where I had to give a commitment to frame guidelines.

There have also been countless questions in every session of Parliament, and Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu had set up a committee of parliamentarians that gave recommendations on the issue of child sexual abuse. In the present guidelines too, we went for the widest consultations possible. We got hundreds of comments and counter-comments, including from the stakeholders. Thus, please disabuse the impression that we are nannies. No, we are not.

So why did the guidelines come?