A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology on Tuesday directed Facebook and Google to comply with the new Information Technology guidelines, Government instructions, follow the laws of the land and the current flaws on data safety and privacy on their part are “unacceptable”.
The committee has sent a letter to Twitter seeking its response within two days on what basis accounts of Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor were blocked.
The committee will also summon representatives of YouTube and other social media intermediaries in the coming weeks over the issue.
The Standing Committee on Information Technology headed by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor which includes 31 members — 21 from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha — summoned Facebook and Google India asking them to send their representatives to appear before it on Tuesday to hear their views on safeguarding citizens’ rights and prevention of misuse of social online news media platforms.
According to sources, the committee told the representatives that there are loopholes in their existing data protection and privacy policy mechanism.
They were asked to put in place stringent safeguards to protect data privacy and data security of their users.
Tharoor has also expressed concern about the privacy of women users of social media platforms. He said he has also received complaints from several women MPs in this regard.
Sharing statistics of manipulated content flagged by the tech giant, Google officials informed the committee members that between January and March 2021, YouTube has removed over 9.5 million videos for violating its community guidelines.”
Of them, 95 per cent of these videos were first flagged by machines rather than humans. Of those detected by machines, 27.8 per cent never received a single view & 39 per cent received 1-10 views”.
“During this same quarter, YouTube terminated over 2.2 million channels for violating its Community Guidelines. In this same period, YouTube removed more than 1 billion comments, the majority of which were spam and were detected automatically,” Google officials said.
Facebook is represented by its country public policy director Shivnath Thukral and general counsel Namrata Singh while Google was represented by its country head (Government affairs and public policy) Aman Jain and director (legal) Gitanjali Duggal. Facebook and Google representatives were called days after Twitter officials deposed before the panel.
According to sources, Facebook officials said it will release a report containing information on content takedown requests it received from the Government and users in India and the action it took for the period between May 15 and June 15 next month, in accordance with the new IT Rules 2021.
The interim report will be published on July 2 while the final report will be published on July 15, containing details of user complaints received and action taken.
Earlier, Facebook has said it will release a report containing information on content takedown requests it received from the Government and users in India and the action it took for the period between May 15 and June 15.
“In accordance with the IT Rules, we’ll publish an interim report for the period May 15-June 15 on July 2. This report will contain details of the content that we have removed proactively using our automated tools,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.
The spokesperson added that the final report will be published on July 15, containing details of user complaints received and action taken.
In the last meeting, several members of the panel had categorically told Twitter that the rule of land is supreme, not the social media platform’s policies.