Meta warns India's three-hour takedown rule may trigger wrongful removals

Meta's Rob Sherman says India's new rule requiring takedowns within three hours may lead to inadvertent removal of genuine content as companies struggle to verify requests

There is a challenge for companies like Meta in implementing the reduced three-hour timeline for taking down a particular content, Rob Sherman, vice president of policy and deputy chief privacy officer at Meta, said on Wednesday. He said there is the possibility of genuine content and accounts being taken down accidentally along with the content that is asked to be pulled off either due to a court order or the order of a designated government official.

 

“Whenever we get a request from the government to look into a piece of content, we have it investigated and validate it ourselves. That is just something that takes time. It is often not possible to turn around in three hours,” Sherman said at a media roundtable on the sidelines of the ongoing AI Impact Summit. 

Last week, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) notified amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, under which it mandated that social media and internet intermediaries must now remove flagged content within three hours, instead of the 36-hour window allowed until now. The new rules come into effect from Friday. 

Though executives from social media intermediaries and legal experts said that there was no formal consultation by the government before the new amendments were notified, senior government officials claimed the changes were made following feedback from stakeholders, who had said that the 36-hour timeline was too much to contain the virality of sensitive content.

 

Meta, Sherman said, is in constant conversation with the government, and is trying to highlight the challenges that companies are likely to face. He added that Meta had a “pretty mature programme” to comply with the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act’s rules and guidelines.

 

“Typically, when new privacy rules get adopted, the timeline is about two years. The Indian government has significantly shortened the timeline. We are still in the process of looking at what it would mean,” Sherman said.

 

The DPDP Rules, notified in November last year, operationalised India’s first comprehensive digital privacy law, which had been under discussion in various forms for more than a decade.

 

In November, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had said the government was in talks with industry stakeholders to compress the compliance timeline under the DPDP Act from 18 months to 12 months.

 

“We are in touch with the industry to further compress time required for compliance because... exactly the same argument we have given to the industry that you already have a compliance framework which is existing in other geographies... why can't you replicate...,” Vaishnaw had then said.