A social network is a place where anyone can say or share anything. In India, there are 451 million monthly active internet users and more people are engaging day by day. The major use of social networks is to connect & communicate with others, but people are just using it to share fake news and these are getting circulated mostly through Facebook and WhatsApp. As a result of it, India is going to revise the existing rules to regulate intermediaries like the social media apps which are causing “unimaginable disruption” to democracy.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology filed a legal document with the country’s apex Supreme Court, saying it would formulate the rules to regulate intermediaries by January 15, 2020. In the document, the government department wrote the internet has “emerged as a potent tool to cause unimaginable disruption to the democratic polity” and added the changes will help to solve “ever-growing threats to individual rights and nation’s integrity, sovereignty, and security.”
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Last year, the Indian government published a draft of guidelines that revises the 2011 laws and now it has to be revisited or the circulation of false information and other misuses of internet platforms will be a bigger issue in the future.
The legal document was filed as a response to the ongoing case in India filed by Facebook to prevent the government from intruding in the personal messages of Indian WhatsApp users, as India has the largest user base of WhatsApp.
There are suggestions that users can link their IDs like Aadhar Card or Voter Card to use these platforms but Facebook argues that it will break the end-to-end encryption system which is available globally.
Now both the parties have some facts on their checklist but as a user first we should think about why these problems are arising in India, but not in other countries. If we stop circulating these fake news and hoax government will not have to enforce any new laws and by that our privacy will remain intact in the future. It’s going to be the same as the case of websites that are blocked to access now.
