The Delhi High Court will hear a petition, challenging the constitutional validity of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 on Thursday, which came in force on February 25, 2021.
The Bench headed by Chief Justice D.N. Patel will hear the petition, filed by Advocate and author Sanjay Kumar Singh. The plea averred concerns regarding the unconstitutional restriction on the petitioner’s freedom of speech and expression in so far as to posting content on social media platform.
It pertinently circle around Section 3(1)(c) and 3 (1) (d) of the statute, respectively; which direct to remove content by social media platforms by alike users like the petitioner and to coherently provide for immediate termination of access to such social media platforms, if such a content is shared or published.
A trivial dispute between Lawyers and Delhi has taken a gigantic form and stunned the national capital.
The news channels are presenting the live coverage of the Lawyers vs Delhi Police controversy.
People who were present at the location saw how a trivial matter resulted in a physical fight between the two groups as other Lawyers and inspectors supported their fellows.
Delhi High Court also dismisses another application of Police seeking permission to lodge FIR against lawyers in Saket District Court incident https://t.co/0YdCuOiNsD
— ANI (@ANI) November 6, 2019
Both groups went out of control, and all the visitors became the audience and started shooting the entire episode on their smartphones and shared the video on social media.
The Delhi High Court Vacation Division bench of Justices Navin Chawla and Asha Menon takes suo motu cognizance on various images of marketplaces circulated on WhatsApp where people were not wearing masks and not following Covid-19 protocols.Read More...
One of the most trending topics that have the people in India worried, is the talk about social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram being banned by the Government.Is this in fact true?
Is the Indian Government really going to take away the platforms which have proven to be a source of income for some, a source of entertainment, and a platform to connect to others?These are the questions that have the people of India quite worked up and worried.However, this doesn’t actually seem to be the case.
It is true, that these platforms, like WhatsApp, are going up against the Indian Government, but there has been no indication by the Indian Government for banning these platforms.What actually happened?About three months back, the Indian Government had issued new digital rules to be followed by platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook.
The terms of the new rules were something along the lines of:They are required to appoint a compliance officer in India.They are required to set up a grievance response mechanism.They are required to take down content within 36 hours of a legal order.They are required to use automated processes to take down offensive content.The government had given these firms till the 26th of May to comply with these rules, failure to do so would take away their protection from lawsuits and prosecutions.
According to the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, this would mean that these “significant social media intermediaries” or sites that are a host to a number of third-party posts, messages, and information, would not be allowed to claim legal immunity from the content posted on their sites.In light of these new rules, Google, to ensure the Indian Government of its continuous efforts to comply with the legal formalities, cited their “long history” of content that they have managed in accordance with a number of local laws.Facebook responded by saying that they “aim to comply” with the rules but at the same time they’ve asked to first discuss a few things that need to be addressed.Twitter on the other hand hasn’t responded to these new digital rules as it is currently already preoccupied being on the radar of the government and Delhi police for its “congress toolkit” tweet controversy.Sites like Koo, having around 6 million users, complied with the new rules last week itself.WhatsApp, the messaging service owned by Facebook, having nearly 400 million users in India filed a petition against the Indian Government on Tuesday.
The company said that the new digital laws put forward by the government would compel the company to violate the privacy of its users.The company made a statement saying, “Requiring messaging apps to ‘trace’ chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp, which would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people’s right to privacy.”WhatsApp has strongly argued against the traceability of messages, as in order to do so would require them to break their encryption of people sending and receiving messages.
