Google received a total of 27,762 complaints for the month of April and the number of removals stood at 59,350 based on its first transparency report under the new Information Technology (IT) Rules 2021 (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code).
Under the new IT rules, any content which violates its community guidelines, product policies, or local legal requirement is removed by the search giant. It even requires companies like Google to hire Indian citizens in key compliance roles, respond to legal information requests within 36 hours, and trace texts, posts or tweets to the first originator within the country.
The new IT rules notified in February 2021, and came into effect in May, it requires significant social media intermediaries (SSMIs) such as Google, Facebook, etc to publish a monthly report on the action taken on user complaints that they have received. Google has been publishing these details as a separate report, every six months since 2009. Under the new IT rules, Google reported that “to allow sufficient time for data processing and validation, there will be a two-month lag for reporting.”
It should be noted that the existing report does not include data relating to impersonation and graphic sexual content complaints received post May 25, 2021, which will be included in future reports. The current data deals with 96 per cent complaints regarding copyright issues (26,707), 1.3 per cent deal with trademark (357). Around 1 per cent dealt with defamation (275). Other legal requests were 1 per cent (272), counterfeits were 0.4 per cent (114 ) and circumvention were 0.1 per cent (37).
Google claims some of its requests “may allege infringement of intellectual property rights, while others claim violation of local laws prohibiting types of content on grounds such as defamation.”
Whatsapp, sued the Indian government on 25 May, seeking to block the rules from being implemented whereas Google and Facebook are two of the largest companies that have said they aim to comply with the laws. As Sundar Pichai, Google chief executive focuses on the company’s plans to comply with India’s new intermediary rules and will continue to publish its transparency reports, which include data on the legal information requests it gets from governments.
While Twitter remained vague in its communications with the government and deliberately leaked reports in the media that it had appointed an interim Grievance officer. Yet again, on June 5, the ministry had sent its final notice to Twitter over non-compliance with the new IT rules, warning it again of penal action. However, Twitter still remained unperturbed and indubitably the government was forced to revoke its status as reported by TFI.
Coming down heavy on the California headquartered company, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that Twitter should not think of itself as bigger than the country.
The Indian government has claimed the intention behind the rules is not to violate the right to privacy. It said the rules have been weighed against the test of proportionality, which is an exception mentioned in the right to privacy ruling. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) wrote a letter to significant intermediaries asking for an update on their compliance status with the new rules.