After Jack Dorsey’s allegations, Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar says govt only wants social media firms to follow laws:

A day after he called Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s allegations about the Indian government’s pressure to censor content as an “outright lie,” Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Wednesday said that the government only requires social media platforms to comply with the country’s laws, and that their relationship is not adversarial.

“The government’s relationship with any platform is really simply through the prism of compliance with the laws and rules. There is nothing adversarial against any particular platform. Regardless of whether you are a big platform, a small platform, a foreign platform or an Indian platform, respecting Indian laws is an uncompromising ask,” Chandrasekhar said at the Digital Bharat Economy Conclave 2023.

He was in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, Indian Express Group.

Reiterating his earlier stance of Twitter being in violation of India’s social media rules, Chandrasekhar said, “Between 2020 and 2022, despite the fact that Twitter was in violation of Indian laws, neither did the government shut it down nor did it jail anybody. There were no punitive consequences as well… It is a little ironic that I have to quote inaction on the part of the government to out the lie that Jack Dorsey has put out”.

“With Twitter in specific, they believed that they were a sovereign entity and, therefore, laws of any nation should not apply to them. We swiftly disabused them of that belief. India is a democratic nation, and we live by the rule of law and therefore regardless of whether you are in San Francisco or Menlo Park or Bengaluru or Hyderabad, the rule of the law applies to you as well,” he added.

Governments around the world have “deified” tech founders from the US Silicon Valley and as a result, they have escaped oversight and the demand for compliance with laws, not just in India, but around the world, Chandrasekhar said. He added that India is shaping the guardrails of tech regulations globally based on consultation and engagement.

“The revelations in the Twitter Files also make it clear that platforms require more oversight because of the kind of arbitrary abuse of power they exercise, either because they follow a particular political ideology, or because somebody just wants to play god,” he said.

The minister also rejected claims of CoWIN’s data leak, categorically denying assertions that the Covid-19 vaccination portal’s data was breached. He also said that some of the data that the Telegram bot was sharing was inaccurate and that it was trying to “mimic a data breach”. Chandrasekhar also alleged that Aadhaar data was breached “repeatedly” before 2014.

“The data that the Telegram bot was throwing up was not from CoWIN. I am emphatically repeating that so that nobody should mistake this and label it as a CoWIN data breach,” he said.

Chandrasekhar said that the IT Ministry is working with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change to devise a policy to deal with electronic waste (e-waste) by creating incentives around e-waste management.

With Thanks Reference To : https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/govt-only-wants-social-media-firms-to-follow-laws-mos-it-8663399/