The Editors Guild of India (EGI) on Friday again urged the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to withdraw the notification empowering the fact-check unit of the Public Information Bureau (PIB) to flag any content related to the Central government as fake, false or misleading and order its take down from online platforms.
In a statement, the EGI expressed concern over the amendment to the IT Rules notified by the Ministry on Thursday, stating that they would have deeply adverse implications for press freedom in the country. Terming it draconian, it also urged the Ministry to conduct consultations with media organisations and press bodies.
According to the notification, social media platforms and other intermediaries on the Internet will have to ensure that the contents declared by the PIB as fake, false or misleading are taken down as and when they are alerted about them.
On Thursday, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar had said: “What the government of India is saying [in these Rules] is that if there is an aggrieved party, and a party that is causing the aggrievement, then Section 79 [of the Information Technology Act, 2000] will not be a safe harbour to prevent a dispute from being adjudicated in the courts.”
The Guild said in effect, through the notification, the government had given itself absolute power to determine what was fake or not in respect of its own work and order take down. “The so-called ‘fact-checking unit’ can be constituted by the Ministry by a simple ‘notification published in the official gazette’,” it said.
“There is no mention of what will be the governing mechanism for such a fact-checking unit, the judicial oversight, the right to appeal, or adherence to the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court of India in Shreya Singhal v Union of India case, with respect to take down of content or blocking of social media handles. All this is against principles of natural justice and akin to censorship,” said the EGI.
The EGI said the Ministry notified the amendment without any “meaningful consultation that it had promised after it withdrew the earlier draft amendments it had put out in January 2023”. “These had given sweeping powers to the Press Information Bureau which was universally criticised by media organisations across the country, including the Guild,” it added.
