The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in an affidavit filed in the high court mentioned that despite being granted three months of time to all SSMIs to comply with the new IT Rules of 2021, Twitter had failed to fully abide by it.
In the previous week, Twitter informed the Delhi High Court that the interim Resident Grievance officer and the interim Nodal Contact person in India had resigned from their position in June.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology pointed out that the Grievances from India were handled by Twitter’s personnel situated in the US which amounted to non-compliance with the IT Rules 2021.
Section 79 of the IT Act in India shields social media platforms or intermediaries for Twitter from liability of any third party information, communication link, data made available or hosted by it in certain cases. When an intermediary fails to observe the IT Rules, it might be liable for any punishment under the law for the offensive content.
It also mentioned that the IT Rules 2021 were the law of law and Twitter was mandatorily required to comply with the same.
Mr. Acharya in a plea filed through the advocates, Akash Vajpai and Manish Kumar, claimed that he wanted to raise a grievance against the two offensive and objectionable tweets at the Resident Grievance Officer.
He added that the petitioner was unable to find the contact details of the Resident Grievance officer on Twitter’s website.
The petition mentioned that from February 25, 2021, onwards, the IT Rules 2021 came into effect and the Centre had given three months time to every significant social media intermediary to comply with the Rules.
