Resolving social media grievances a tough job for GACs, warn policy experts

Resolving social media grievances a tough job for GACs, warn policy experts

A day after the government notified the IT Amendment Rules, 2022, several public policy experts flagged challenges in front of the upcoming grievance appellate committees (GACs). This is mainly due to the huge volume of content-related complaints on social media platforms. The government has repeatedly expressed concern over flaws in the grievance redressal mechanism of various social media platforms.

Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the failure to resolve complaints of citizens is prompting the government to take this step. He added that the grievance redressal mechanism that the government had left to the intermediaries to manage by simply appointing a grievance officer is broken and not functional.

“We have lakhs of messages from citizens and digital Nagariks, whose grievances were not responded to or received a ‘thank you for your message’ response. And, that is not acceptable for us,” the minister had said at a press conference on Saturday.

However, public advocacy groups believe the scope of work in front of the GACs might make it difficult to resolve user grievances effectively.

“While the move is well-intentioned, creating grievance appellate committees nominated by the government is likely to pose a grave risk to freedom of speech besides being administratively challenging. Given the volume of users on the internet, the number of complaints may be too large for the committees to handle,” said Rohit Kumar, founder partner at policy advocacy firm TQH Consulting.

Kumar said a better solution may be tiered levels of appeal at the platform level with independent stakeholders from outside that finally culminates into the judicial system.

The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), on Friday, had released the final version of the new amendments to the IT Rules, 2021. 

The newly inserted rules allow the government to appoint multiple GACs to redress complaints over social media content moderation.

Chandrasekhar on Saturday also said the government will start redressing social media grievances by appointing one or two committees at the beginning. It will appoint more if the need grows in the future. He had added that the government will present the structure, the organisation, and the workings of the GAC “very shortly”. 

In June, when the draft proposals were made open to the public for consultation, the ministry had stated that there was a need to set up a GAC. This because it had observed that many officers of intermediaries did not address grievances satisfactorily. 

However, the government had also suggested that the industry may come up with a self-regulatory organisation.

Big Tech companies could not reach a consensus as Google was not ready for an external review. Also, Meta and Twitter favoured self-regulation to avoid government overreach. None in the Big Tech replied immediately on the changed rules. 

But sources said this will now mean that more efforts will be needed to solve issues at their end and not escalate to the GACs. A spokesperson of a global trade organisation, said, “It seems the government has used its prerogative and decided to stick with creating the GACs. But this isn't what was proposed by us during the public consultations. We had proposed a self-regulatory organisation to resolve social media grievances.”

According to the gazette notification released by the MeitY, the government will establish one or more GACs within three months.

Each committee will consist of a chairperson and two whole-time members appointed by the government. One member will be an ex-officio member and two will be independent.

Digital rights advocates warned about possible problems in the capacity of the committees. Prateek Waghre, policy director, Internet Freedom Foundation, said the GAC may not be capable of meeting the many challenges in today’s information ecosystem.
 

According to public advocacy groups, the provision that requires social media platforms to remove unlawful content within 72 hours of reporting may escalate issues with the capacity of content moderation. Amol Kulkarni, director (research) at CUTS International said the provision may turn out to be unfair to small platforms.

“There is a problem because not all intermediaries will have the capacity to take down objectionable content within 72 hours. This creates concern of disproportionate or unfair treatment for smaller intermediaries, who might not be in a position to do that. It may be useful to review this,” Kulkarni said.

Kazim Rizvi, founder of the public policy advocacy firm The Dialogue, agrees with Kulkarni's views on the 72 hour timeline and welcomes the tweak in what comes under this timeline. "In the revised rules, the timeline of 72 hours is only applicable to serious offences such as circulation of CSAM and women safety issues."

He further added, "We also welcome the qualification of the mandate ‘to cause the user to not publish harmful content’, by adding the term ‘reasonable measures’, which means that the mandate is not a pre-condition for availing safe harbour and platforms are only required to take steps to obviate publication of harmful content on a best effort basis."

Raising red-flags

• More efforts will be needed to resolve issues at the level of the social media platforms
• With the volume of users on the internet, the number of complaints may be too large for the committees to handle
• Digital rights advocates warned about possible problems in the capacity of the committees
• Experts believe the GAC may not be capable of meeting the many challenges in today’s information ecosystem
• The government said the industry may come up with a self-regulatory body
• Groups say the provision that requires social media firms to remove unlawful content within 72 hours may escalate issues with the capacity of content moderation