Kunal Kamra’s plea: No notification on fact checking unit till July 10, Centre tells HC

The Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has said it will not establish a fact-checking unit until 10 July. The announcement came during a hearing of a case brought by satirist Kunal Kamra, who argued that the unit would curtail his freedom of speech and violate the constitution. Kamra has challenged a recent amendment to IT rules which allows the government to create the unit to identify fake or misleading news about the government on social media. The next hearing in the case will take place on 6 July.

The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) on Wednesday assured the Bombay high court that it would not issue till July 10 a notification to set up a fact checking unit (FCU) which would identify fake or misleading news related to the Central government and its policies on social media platforms.

Comedian - Kunal Kamra

The assurance came when a division bench of justice Gautam Patel and justice Neela Gokhale was hearing a petition filed by satirist Kunal Kamra.

Kamra has challenged the recent amendment to the IT Rules, which permits the Centre to form an FCU, saying that his stand-up act is based on political satire and hence, the powers that the FCU will be vested with will curtail his freedom of speech.

The HC accepted the Centre’s affidavit and directed Kamra to file his reply before July 6, the next date of hearing. On that date, the court will also hear another petition filed by the Editors Guild of India. The bench has asked the Editors Guild to file its response too.

Kamra had, in his petition filed on April 10, said that the validity of the amended rules 3(i)(II)(A) and (C) was ultra vires to section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and was violative of the principles enshrined in articles 14, 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(g) of the constitution.

The rules cast an obligation upon intermediaries (social media platforms) to make “reasonable efforts to cause users to not publish, display, upload or share information in respect of business of the Central government that is identified as fake, false or misleading by such FCU as the MeitY may specify”, the petition said.

Kamra has contended that the rules do not define the term “business of the Central government”. He has also expressed apprehension over misuse of the term “reasonable efforts”, stating that the intermediary may simply take down the content if the FCO identifies it as fake, or make it unavailable for users in India.

The satirist has further said that his “ability to engage in political satire would be unreasonably and excessively curtailed if his content were subjected to manifestly arbitrary, subjective fact-check by a hand-picked unit designated by the Central government”. “Satire, by its very nature, does not lend to such a fact-checking exercise.”

The Centre’s affidavit, filed by MeitY scientist V Chinnasamy, however, said that as it was the right of an individual to free speech, it was the duty of the Centre to ensure that citizens using internet platforms had access to factual and true information.

Misinformation or false information could lead to a law-and-order situation and harm the nation and hence, the Centre had tried to balance the interest of the persons disseminating information through the internet as well as its recipients and the nation by introducing the amendment, the affidavit said.

The Centre further claimed that the amended rules were only intended to “make the intermediaries (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook) responsible to check (with due diligence) what is stated hereinabove (through the posts), without any obligation to either take it down or block the information/content”.

The amendment permits any person aggrieved by the posts/content to pursue legal remedy with the competent court being the final arbiter in the matter, the affidavit added.