Officer To Be Appointed For Action Against Deep Fake, Social Media Platforms Given 7 Days To Comply With IT Rules

On the Deepfakes issue, the Union Electronics and Information Technology Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday said that ' from today onwards MeitY and the Government of India will nominate a Rule Seven officer and will take a 100% compliance expectation from all the platforms...'. He said, that the centre has also asked all the platforms to transform their terms of use with their users to be consistent with the twelve areas that are prohibited on the Indian Internet. Rajeev Chandrasekhar further said that the internet platforms have agreed to ensure harmonization and alignment on their sites for user safety within seven days. 

Addressing the press after a meeting on the deep fake issue, the Union Minister said, "From today onwards, MeitY and the Government of India will nominate a Rule Seven officer and will take a 100% compliance expectation from all the platforms... As far as harms are concerned, that includes Deep Fakes and also includes CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) also includes various other categories of content that are prohibited on the Indian Internet..."

He said, "The Rule Seven officer will also be a person who will create a platform where it will be very easy for citizens to bring to the attention of the Government of India their notices or allegations or reports of violation of law by the platforms. And the Rule Seven officer will take that digital platform information and respond accordingly. So we'll make it very simple for the citizen to report violations of law by platforms to the government..."

Giving information about the meeting, Chandrasekhar said, "We had a very longish meeting with all of the important players on the Internet, the Internet intermediaries. And we have raised the issue of Deep Fakes with them... I reminded them that way back from October 2022, the government of India has been alerting them to the threat of misinformation and Deep Fakes, which are part of misinformation."

"The intermediaries today all agreed that the current IT rules under the IT Act provide for adequate compliance requirements on their part to deal with Deep Fake, even as we speak to future regulations and a future law, which is certainly required, given that our IT Act is 23 years old. It was emphasized to them again, to which they have agreed that the current law and the current act and the current rules provide for compliance requirements by the platforms on misinformation, patently false information and Deep Fakes," he said.

He further said the central government has summoned online platforms including Google, Facebook, YouTube to warn them that severe action will be taken against them if they do not remove deepfakes from their sites.