Here’s what India’s new IT rules want — and why WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and others are reluctant to comply

In Brazil, Diego Dzodan — Facebook’s vice president for Latin America in 2016 — was arrested after refusing to hand over WhatsApp messages that the local authorities alleged had been sent by drug dealers. He was later released with the judge deeming his arrest an ‘unlawful coercion’.

In India, Facebook’s managing director, Ajit Mohan, wasn’t arrested but was named in a petition to the Supreme Court on Delhi Riots in 2020.

And, most recently, Twitter’s offices in New Delhi and Gurgaon were raided as the police looked into the matter of the social media platform’s ‘manipulated media’ tag.

There has always been a tussle between the ‘law of the land’ and social media platforms’ own regulations. Appointing local officers to address concerns puts them in the cross hairs of being pressured by the local authorities.

According to the Facebook Oversight Board, in their recent verdict on the suspension of former US President Donald Trump, social media companies need to take special measures to protect their employees from political pressure.

And, when you’re as big as Facebook or Google, political pressure is a given.

End-to-end encryption is the bread and butter of WhatsApp. Without encryption and the safety blanket of knowing that you’re not being tracked is something that the users of the social networking platform covet.

“End-to-end encryption helps negative elements from penetrating the database or exploiting confidential information and thereby providing a sort of safeguard to official communications or private confidential communications as well. The question is should the safety and confidence of users be compromised,” Neeraj Dubey, a partner specialising in corporate law at Singh and Associates, told Business Insider.

The new rules dictate that a company like WhatsApp should be to track down the ‘first originator’. According to the government, such a request will only be made when there is sexually explicit content being circulated or a threat to national security is in play.

And, what one may find offensive, another may consider to simply be an exercise in the freedom of expression.

“Technology companies need regulation but not at the expense of user rights,” said Choudhary.

The Indian government also wants ‘significant’ social media intermediaries to monitor online content using artificial intelligence (AI), which, to be fair, is something that they’re already trying to do.

The problem is that while ‘pre-moderation’ can be done using AI, post and reactive moderation is normally done by humans. And the stressful conditions of taking up this job aren’t a secret — especially in cases where the task has been outsourced to third parties.

While AI is definitely necessary, there are limitations to how far it can go. Online content is constantly evolving and implementing the process at scale is a complex task. And, with more people coming online, the amount of content to moderate will only increase.