IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav Says Social Media Platforms Should Take Responsibility Of The Content They Publish

Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav has given a statement regarding the content on social media platforms. In the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, Singapore, the minister said that social media platforms should

take responsibility for all the content that goes live on their platforms. He said, Everybody is worried about the very significant influence that social media is having on the trust between institutions and the citizens. That trust is getting absolutely broken because of deepfakes, because of synthetic material which is flowing around, because of rumours, which get amplified at the speed of light. So, all those things are really worrying everybody. Social Media platforms must start taking responsibility of what they are publishing so that society at large doesn't get harmed by what they publish. So, we take the approach called technolegal, and I'll give you one example, our data protection act. We decided to go for a principle-based law. Now, we have defined that principles, and we know that technology evolves every quarter or maybe even every month in some cases. Under such circumstances, you cannot have a very prescriptive kind of law.Also Read: India's First Privacy-Focused Law DPDP Rules 2025 Goes Live: What It Means For Users We believe in a combination of innovation and regulation, where our tilt is more towards innovation. So that the good things can come to society while the harm can be separated. We are deeply engaged with the industry as well as society to strike a balance. Every company which works in India must follow India's constitution and laws. And every platform must understand what is the social structure of the country in which they are operating.'

How Possible Is This?

Despite all the checks and policies, as of now, you can still find content that is inappropriate in a lot of senses available on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms like X, Snapchat, and more. And scrutiny or monitoring of all this content will require a lot of efforts and investment which and still there is no surety that everything that is deemed inappropriate will be removed from the platforms or not.