Govt set to notify new IT rules on deepfakes for social media: Chandrasekhar
NEW DELHI : The government is set to notify rules that will mandate social media platforms to tackle the menace of deepfakes, after repeated advisories failed to get the desired result, Union minister of state for information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Tuesday. “We had issued an advisory and we have also said that if we are not satisfied with the compliance, we will notify newly-amended rules that are much more specific to the issue of misinformation and deepfake in particular.
You can take it from me today that we are going to issue newly-amended IT rules over the next seven to eight days," the minister said while responding to questions from the media. “If it is not enough after the government suggests through an advisory, what amendments have to be done to the Terms of Use, we will then embed that explicitly in the rules, which we’re now going to do," he added.
The minister added that the advisories issued to the intermediaries on deepfake and misinformation will ‘find their way into the rules in almost the same language’ and that the amended terms of use which were issued as advisories to the intermediaries, will now be made part of the rules and compliance will be mandatory. Penalties will be adjudicated as per criminal law, for instance, in case of a person being affected or harmed by deepfake, the affected party can file a police complaint which will be dealt with under Section 469 of the Indian Penal Code that specifies punishment for forgery.
Chandrasekhar said that the a “bystander clause" will be added to the IT Rules, where users or bystanders can report incidents of illegal content to the police. This will have a similar effect as provisions available under the Protection of Children from Sexual
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