New Delhi: A parliamentary panel has recommended that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter should be considered publishers and a regulator should be set up to oversee them. TeaA Bloomberg report said he made the recommendation when a high-level committee was reviewing the personal data protection bill.
Quoting officials with knowledge of the matter, the report said the panel has sought stricter rules as the existing laws are not sufficient to regulate these social media platforms by treating them as ‘middlemen’.
To regulate the content, the committee recommended that the regulator should be set up on the lines of the Press Council of India. “A mechanism could be put in place to hold social media platforms accountable for content coming from unverified accounts,” the report quoted officials as saying.
The Joint Parliamentary Committee on Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (JPP) on Monday adopted the final draft despite dissenting notes by some opposition MPs. The bill, which seeks to protect the privacy of users and impose strict controls on the way data is collected, processed and stored, will be introduced in the winter session of Parliament.
The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, was drafted following the 2017 Supreme Court decision, which declared the right to privacy as a fundamental right of citizens.
The head of the panel, PP Chowdhury, told Bloomberg that the recommendations would be tabled in Parliament during the winter session. Crimes under the bill can be punished with fines of up to 4 percent of the annual global turnover of social media companies – similar to penalties in the European Union.
In India, these companies cannot currently be held liable for user-generated content on their platforms. However, they have been mandated to comply with the arbitrator guidelines issued earlier this year. This includes setting up offices in India, appointing compliance officers and complying with the government’s requests to remove certain types of content it considers harmful.
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