Compliance of law crucial for government's relationship with social media platforms, says IT minister

The Minister of State for IT and Electronics said the government certainly and consistently asks social media platforms to respect Indian laws and the government's relationship with any social media platform is simply through the prism of compliance with laws and rules. He also insisted that there is nothing personal or adversarial against one platform or the other.

Speaking at the inaugural edition of FinancialExpress.com's Digital Bharat Economy Conclave 2023, he claimed the former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's recent statement is an "outright lie". Dorsey alleged that during the farmer protest, the Indian government pressured the microblogging platform and threatened to shut down Twitter in India and raid the homes of employees if it didn't listen to what was being told.

"It is an outright lie because at no time in history, specifically in the 2020-2022 period, has the Government of India ever done anything to Twitter, despite the fact that the platform was in violation of Indian laws for a period of two years. The government didn't shut down Twitter or jail anybody and it is ironic because I have to quote inaction on the part of the government against violation of law to deny what Jack Dorsey has put out there. So, a lot of stuff about Twitter that is now in public domain reinforces the need for governments all around the world, including in India, to have very clear guard rails for these platforms," he said.

He further highlighted what the government thinks are the problematic aspects of Twitter. "One is that they believe they are a sovereign entity and therefore the rules and laws of any nation didn't apply. But the rules apply to all. Secondly, it has become very clear that these platforms require more oversight because of the kind of arbitrary abuse of power that they exercise either because they follow a particular political ideology or because somebody just wants to play God."

He also rebuffed claims of a data breach of the CoWin platform (the COVID vaccination portal). "I would like to emphasise that there was no breach of the CoWin database. Whatever personal information the Telegram bot was throwing up was not from the CoWin database. The Centre is still trying to investigate every aspect of the data. How old the data is, where did it come from, and if this is a deliberate attempt to mimic a breach is being investigated."

He also spoke of the AI revolution and said that India is ready for it. "AI is at an initial stage as of now and it is only going to enable tasks, get things done faster and with more intelligence, rather than replace humans or mimic human behaviour. Whoever has a reasonable view of AI knows that it won't completely replace jobs. Currently, AI is very far from human reasoning and mimicking reasoning."