India’s proposed amendments to the Information Technology Rules, 2021, would bring Community Notes — a crowdsourced fact-checking feature on X — under the ministry of information and broadcasting’s regulatory remit whenever they touch news and current affairs, HT has reported. Simply put, it will allow the government to take down a note correcting a minister’s claim. Officials call the change procedural. The government has made this argument before. The PIB’s Fact Check Unit, notified in 2023, empowered it to flag content about its own business as false, with platforms risking loss of safe harbour if they did not comply. The Bombay High Court struck it down as unconstitutional. The Centre has challenged the ruling. The court’s reasoning was straightforward: A government that determines what is false about itself is not a fact-checker.
The question of who holds social media — platforms and users — accountable cannot be answered by either the government or the platforms, because both are parties to the dispute. (AP)
That said, Community Notes are not always accurate, and not always disinterested. For instance, a note beneath a post by President Droupadi Murmu — in which she stated that the government works for marginalised and vulnerable communities — appended a clarification that the head of State is constitutionally obligated to serve all citizens, not a particular constituency. The President’s statement was not incorrect; the note, in tenor, reframed a commitment to constitutionally recognised protections for the vulnerable as partisan overreach. How notes are ranked, who contribute to them, what motivates their interventions — all of this sits behind a black box that only X can look into.
Still, for all its flaws, Community Notes is the closest the internet has come to a self-correcting mechanism that does not vest editorial judgment in either a corporation or a State. But it operates in a vacuum left by a deeper failure. Newspapers, broadcasters, and wire agencies still operate under editorial codes, legal liability, and verification norms — the accountability architecture that accompanies their reach. Social media give influencers the reach of a newspaper with none of the accompanying accountability. Neither platforms nor governments have built anything to bridge that gap. The proposed amendments do not distinguish between an accuracy problem and a political inconvenience, and they hand the power to make that distinction to the party least equipped to make it disinterestedly. Nor are the platforms a credible alternative. The proposition that private corporations headquartered abroad should arbitrate speech is no more defensible than the proposition that a government ministry should.
India must build an independent regulatory body for social media content moderation, insulated from government direction and platform capture, with defined scope and appellate mechanisms. It has built such institutions before; the markets regulator (SEBI), for one. It has not built one for content moderation, partly because both the government and the platforms have found the current ambiguity useful, and also because regulating content that moves at the speed of the internet demands technical imagination that bureaucracy has not demonstrated. Instead, it has sought a ministry with a takedown power. The internet gave everyone the equivalent of a printing press. That in itself poses questions pertaining to misinformation and trust. The question of who holds social media — platforms and users — accountable cannot be answered by either the government or the platforms, because both are parties to the dispute.
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