Twitter appoints California-based Jeremy Kessel as India Grievance Officer

Jeremy Kessel is the Global Legal Policy Director of Twitter

Twitter on Sunday appointed California-based Jeremy Kessel as the new Grievance Officer for India, as required under the new Information Technology Rules, 2021, hours after Dharmendra Chatur quit from the post, Bar and Bench reported.

His appointment, however, is not seen to be in line with new IT rules guidelines, which mandate that the grievance redressal officer should be a resident of India.

Kessel is the Global Legal Policy Director of Twitter.

The development comes at a time when the micro-blogging platform has been engaged in a tussle with the Indian government over the new social media rules. The government has slammed Twitter for deliberate defiance and failure to comply with the country's new IT rules.

The new rules, which came into effect from May 25 mandate social media companies to establish a grievance redressal mechanism for resolving complaints from the users or victims.

All significant social media companies, with over 50 lakh user base shall appoint a grievance officer to deal with such complaints and share the name and contact details of such officers.

The big social media companies are mandated to appoint a chief compliance officer, a Nodal Contact Person and a resident grievance officer. All of them should be resident in India.

Twitter in response to the final notice issued by the government on June 5 had said that it intends to comply with the new IT rules and will share details of the chief compliance officer. In the meantime, the microblogging platform had appointed Chatur as interim resident grievance officer for India.

According to a government official, the company has lost legal protection as an intermediary and will be legally held responsible for all content posted by its users on the platform.