The BJP MP from south Bengaluru on Wednesday raised an issue which favors the users and public action compared to the long list of government or social media concerns as his concern is related to people’s free speech which has been curbed by social media and also restricted by the government. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter are censuring the nationalistic content, they are censuring content posted by a user with the nationalistic approach. He has asked government intervention for the protection of such content.
While speaking in Lok Sabha during zero hour he talked about the credible allegation made against Facebook and Twitter and their affiliates for censuring the post posted by the third parties on their platform especially with the nationalistic approach. His concern was during the election and in normal life, this restricts free speech.
The law protects social media sites from intervening in the third party data while limiting their power but allows the government to take action against. Another law supports social media power to stop the user’s content which makes the free speech guardians question the action of social media but not to the government. Giving the exact philosophical meaning to the term nationalistic while widening the power of social media and will not curb the free speech if it is nationalistic too.
He said while explaining that these social media site believes that they are the intermediate under the meaning of IT Act, 2000. The key element of this definition gives limited support to the intermediate which doesn’t allow them to intervene in the processing, storing, and transmitting data of the third party users and content of the users.
Therefore, Section 79 of the Act provides these intermediaries exemption from liability. An intermediary receives protection that a regular publisher does not receive, he said. Surya said while this is the explicit spirit of the statute, the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules, while laying down what sort of third party content must be prohibited by the privacy policy and terms and conditions of the intermediary, goes far beyond the remit of Article 19(2) of the Constitution read with Section 79 and 69 of the IT Act.
Article 19(2) of the Constitution authorizes the government to impose, by law, reasonable restrictions upon the freedom of speech and expression “in the interests of… public order”, whereas section 69 of the IT Act allows the government to intercept any information and ask for information decryption. Surya said the guidelines essentially empower private party intermediaries to remove based on user complaints or suo moto any content deemed to violate its guidelines. He said these guidelines are not only ultra vires the parent statute but also unconstitutional as the grounds they provide are too wide and will fail the standards of constitutionality set out by the Supreme Court in the Shreya Singhal case while striking down Sec 66A of the IT Act (which provided police the power to arrest a person for posting “offensive” content online).
The guidelines are problematic because they empower private enterprises performing essentially a public function to act as censors of free speech without government oversight, thus effectively and severely impacting safeguards of the fundamental right to free speech, he said.”I, therefore, urge the government to repeal such unconstitutional guidelines and issue new ones to govern social media platforms, thereby protecting the fundamental right to free speech of our citizens and protect our democracy from foreign interference,” he said.
