India tightened rules governing social media content and platforms, particularly targeting artificially generated and manipulated material, in a bid to crack down on the rapid spread of misinformation and deepfakes.
The government on Tuesday notified new rules under an existing law requiring social media firms to comply with takedown requests from Indian authorities within three hours and prominently label AI-generated content. The rules also require platforms to put in place measures to prevent users from posting unlawful material.
The changes come days before India is set to host an international summit on artificial intelligence, where OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc are expected to speak. India has lately increased oversight of online content and discourse.
Companies will need to invest in 24-hour monitoring centers as enforcement shifts toward platforms rather than users, said Nikhil Pahwa, founder of MediaNama, a publication tracking India’s digital policy. “AI diffusion has taken place rapidly and that’s leading to the need to act,” he said.
The onus of identification, removal and enforcement falls on tech firms, which could lose immunity from legal action if they fail to act within the prescribed timeline. Representatives of X, Meta Platforms Inc and Google did not respond to requests for comment.
The amendments follow complaints in India over AI-generated sexualized images, including those involving minors, on the social media platform X.
Pahwa said enforcing the new rules may prove difficult given the sheer volume of AI models. “We are solving yesterday’s problems using yesterday’s approaches and we need to be more thoughtful about how we deal with it now because it’s changing too fast,” he said.
Concern over the influence of social media fueled debate on age restrictions for access, posing another challenge to Big Tech in its largest market. Although companies earn less revenue per user in India than in developed markets like the US, the country offers a vast pool of untapped users, data for AI modeling and a young, online demographic.
Earlier this month, India’s economic survey raised concerns over digital privacy and addiction. The annual survey is released by India’s Ministry of Finance and represents an annual report card on the economy and lays out the outlook for the country.
