On Thursday, the Centre notified new guidelines for intermediaries in “soft touch oversight” rules, saying that these were needed to hold social media and other companies accountable for “misuse and abuse”. These will require Big Tech platforms to set up stronger grievance redressal mechanisms, and appoint executives to coordinate with law enforcement in India.

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For social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, among others, the guidelines essentially remove the “safe harbour” provided to these companies. It limited their liability over content that users posted on their platforms, if the platforms do not comply with due diligence norms.

“We do not want the content, because the content is already out there in the form of tweets or messages. But, who began the mischief? This, they (social media platforms) will have to disclose,” said the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Ravi Shankar Prasad, while announcing India’s new IT rules.

The rules also call for a three-tier regulation mechanism for over-the-top (OTT) platforms like Netflix, YouTube, and others and require them to self-classify their content into five categories based on age suitability.

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Encryption has been a safety blanket for many concerned with the issue of privacy.  It has been the night light to keep privacy-nightmares away. But, that may no longer be the case with India’s new social media regulations.

GOI thinks that it has found a loophole. It claims that it does not care about what messages are being passed around, but if an incident is found to have been instigated through social media, they want to know who started it all, they want to find the ‘first originator’.

For example, if the government wants to find out who began amassing the mobs who attacked the students in university hostels in Delhi, the Social media and the WhatsApp teams meed to pinpoint the first person who sent the first message in that regard.

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The announcement by the centre has put the SM platforms and especially those like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal in a fix. They are now literally caught off-guard in a catch-22 situation.

Without being able to peep at the content, how can one know who started a particular incident? And, how far back do you go to assign blame?

Platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram, who run their business on promising users’ privacy with end-to-end encryption, are going to have a tough time dealing with such a regulation once it comes into play after three months, when the new regulations are set to be enforced.

The problem area for such platforms would probably be the encryption, which ensures privacy, which as per the Supreme Court of India is a fundamental right. To follow the new guidelines on Social media from GOI, the technical teams of the platforms would need to breach the privacy, in case any incident is triggered by the Social media. How to ensure the due-diligence towards the guidelines without hampering privacy? That is the central question facing the platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, and others.