India’s government is planning to create a state fact-checking unit with the power to order social media platforms to take down content about its activities that it deems “fake or misleading.”
In an amendment to rules covering digital and social media, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said that the fact-checking would apply to information about “any business of the central government” on social media platforms.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a minister in the IT ministry, however said that the updated rules did not represent “censoring at all,” and that social media companies could choose to continue to share content that fell foul of the fact-checking process, but there would be consequences if they did.
If these companies failed to take down the offending content, Chandrasekhar said, they would lose the automatic legal protection they currently enjoy against complaints about third-party content on their platforms. That would open up the possibility for aggrieved parties, including government ministries, to take them to court.
“The dangers of misinformation, the impact of patently false information in a democracy like ours, is never to be underestimated,” Chandrasekhar said.
The Editors Guild of India, a nonprofit organization representing more than 200 journalists, said in a statement on Friday that it was “deeply disturbed” by the new rules, saying they had “deeply adverse implications” for press freedom in India.
The Editors Guild expressed alarm that there was no mention in the rules of “what will be the governing mechanism for such a fact-checking unit, the judicial oversight, [or] the right to appeal.”
“In effect, the government has given itself absolute power to determine what is fake or not, in respect of its own work, and order take down,” the guild added. It urged the government to withdraw the rule change and consult with media organizations.
Concern has been brewing in recent months over the Indian government’s increasingly restrictive stance towards the media.
