MeitY issues advisory to social media cos after Rashmika's controversy

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has issued an advisory to social media companies and reiterated the existing advisory, sources said on Tuesday.

According to the sources, the advisory reiterated the existing rules including 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000: Punishment for cheating by personation by using computer resources: imprisonment of up to 3 years and a fine of up to Rs 1 lakh.

"IT Intermediary Rules: Rule 3(1)(b)(vii): Social media intermediary shall observe due diligence including ensuring the rules and regulations, privacy policy or user agreement of the intermediary inform users not to host any content that impersonates another person," sources said.

"Rule 3(2)(b): Intermediary shall, within 24 hours from the receipt of a complaint in relation to any content ... in the nature of impersonation in an electronic form, including artificially morphed images of such individual, take all .. measures to remove or disable access to such content," it added.

This comes after a controversy regarding a deep fake video of Actress Rashmika Mandhani had surfaced.

The Actress on Monday strongly reacted to the alleged deep fake video which went viral on social media. The 'Pushpa: The Rise' actor took to Instagram Story and shared a note that read, "I feel really hurt to share this and have to talk about the deep fake video of me being spread online. Something like this is honestly, extremely scary not only for me but also for each one of us who today is vulnerable to so much harm because of how technology is being misused."

"Today, as a woman and as an actor, I am thankful for my family, friends and well-wishers who are my protection and support system. But if this happened to me when I was in school or college, I genuinely can't imagine how could I ever tackle this. We need to address this as a community and with urgency before more of us are affected by such identity theft."

In the viral video, it can be seen that a woman resembling the actress Rashmika was entering a lift wearing a black swimsuit. The video quickly went viral and several social media users came forward to confirm that it was a deep fake. It was later identified that the video was of a British Actress Zara Patel.