The Delhi High Court on Tuesday gave two days’ time to Twitter to come up with a specific timeline for appointing a Grievance Officer in compliance with India’s new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules 2021.
“ It’s been more than two weeks...If the interim Grievance Officer ran away on June 21, the least Twitter was expected to do was to appoint a fresh officer in these 14 days before the matter came up today,” Justice Rekha Palli remarked.
Twitter admitted that it was currently not in compliance with the 2021 IT Rules as it was in the process of appointing its Grievance Officer and the Nodal Officer.
“How long does the process of appointing a Grievance Officer take? If Twitter thinks it can take as much time as it wants in our country, I will not permit that,” Justice Palli cautioned the micro-blogging site.
Judge’s warning
Justice Palli directed Twitter’s counsel to come up with a clear picture of the compliance timeline by July 8, the next date of hearing. “Otherwise you [Twitter] are in trouble,” the judge warned.
Senior advocate Sajan Poovayya, representing Twitter, sought time to seek instruction on the specific timeline for completing the appointment of the Grievance Officer.
Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Chetan Sharma, representing the Centre, said there had been a non-compliance of the IT Rules by Twitter for over 42 days. “Facebook has removed 3 crore contents, Instagram has removed 18 lakh, Google has removed 3 lakh, Twitter can certainly do better,” the ASG said.
‘Misleading submission’
The High Court also took strong objection to Twitter’s counsel informing it on the last date of hearing that the micro-blogging site had already appointed a Resident Grievance Officer on May 28, 2021. In view of the statement, the High Court had granted time to Twitter to submit a counter-affidavit.
“The said reply has been filed. A perusal shows that Twitter had as on May 31, 2021 only appointed only an interim resident grievance officer, which fact was not brought to the notice of the court,” the High Court noted.
Centre’s reply
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity), in an affidavit filed before the High Court, stated that despite three months being granted to all Significant Social Media Intermediaries (SSMIs) to comply with the new IT rules, Twitter had failed to fully comply with the same.
The Ministry said Twitter had failed to comply with India’s law regulating tech companies rendering their services as ‘intermediaries’.
Twitter, last week, had informed the High Court that the interim Resident Grievance Officer and the interim Nodal Contact Person in India had resigned from their positions in June. The tech giant had stated that it was in the final stages of appointing a replacement, meanwhile “the grievances of Indian users are being addressed by the Grievance Officer”.
The Meity, however, pointed out that as per the details gleaned from Twitter’s website, the grievances from India were currently being handled by its personnel situated in the United States of America “which amounts to non-compliance with the IT Rules 2021”.
In India, Section 79 of the IT Act shields social media platforms or intermediaries such as Twitter from liability for any third party information, data, or communication link made available or hosted by it in certain cases.
The Ministry said when an intermediary failed to observe the IT Rules, the intermediary could be liable for any punishment under any law for the time being in force in respect of the offending content.
The Ministry’s affidavit came in response to a petition by advocate Amit Acharya, seeking to appoint a Resident Grievance Officer under Rule 4 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules 2021.
Mr. Acharya, in his plea filed through advocates Akash Vajpai and Manish Kumar, had claimed that he wanted to raise grievance against two alleged “offensive and objectionable tweets” at the Resident Grievance Officer.
“However, the petitioner was unable to find the contact details of the Resident Grievance Officer on the website of Twitter,” he had said.
The petition said that from February 25, 2021 the Information Technology Rules 2021 had come into effect and the Centre had given three months’ time to every significant social media intermediary to comply with the rules.
