Among the expanding chorus of concerns about social media corporations’ impact and dominance, the United States has established six important principles to limit their power. Competition; privacy; teenage mental health; misinformation and disinformation; unlawful and abusive behaviour, especially sexual exploitation; and algorithmic discrimination and lack of transparency are among the issues addressed.
These ideas are consistent with global scepticism about the power of social media platforms, as countries around the world, including India, seek to curb these platforms’ dominance.
“While tech platforms can help keep us connected, create a vibrant marketplace of ideas, and open up new opportunities for bringing products and services to market, they can also divide us and wreak serious real-world harms,” the White House said in a statement following a discussion with experts and practitioners on the harms that tech platforms could cause.
It stated a tiny number of dominant Internet platforms utilise their influence to “exclude market entrants, engage in rent-seeking, and amass intimate personal information that they might use for their own advantage,” calling for clear regulations on dealing with competition challenges. The White House also stated that there should be explicit constraints on our ability to gather, utilise, transmit, and store our personal data, as well as limits on targeted advertising.
One of the White House’s core objectives is to remove the legal protection afforded to social media sites under Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act (CDA). This section is comparable to Section 79 of India’s Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act), which designates social media platforms as intermediaries and protects them from legal prosecution based on content posted by users on their platform.
Both of these policies provide social media sites with what is known as “safe harbour.” Because platforms cannot control what users publish on their site in the first place, they should not be held legally accountable for any offensive content they host as long as they agree to remove such content when detected by the government or various courts. Because social media platforms are often regarded as critical means for free expression, safe harbour is commonly seen as a fundamental element of ensuring freedom of expression on these platforms.
The White House, on the other hand, has called for “fundamental reforms” to Section 230, citing the “magnitude of illegal and abusive conduct hosted or disseminated by platforms, but for which they are currently immune from liability and lack adequate incentive to reasonably address, such as child sexual exploitation, cyberstalking, and non-consensual distribution of intimate images of adults.”
India declared substantial revisions to its social media legislation in the form of the Information Technology Rules, 2021 (IT Rules) in February 2021, imposing significant due diligence obligations on prominent social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Some Them Rules sections have been challenged by social media companies, with WhatsApp filing a case against one that requires it to trace the first originator of a message. If a user has shared child sexual abuse content on the platform, the platform may be obliged to track the originator. WhatsApp, on the other hand, has claimed that the rule will weaken encryption security on its network, thereby jeopardising the personal conversations of millions of Indians.
India is also overhauling its technology rules and is scheduled to release a replacement for its IT Act, 2000, which will address net neutrality, data privacy, and algorithmic accountability of social media sites.
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