Google, Meta and Twitter report action taken against objectionable content as MeitY plans to tighten its reins

With the government eyeing making rules for social media and the IT ministry circulating draft rules for social media platforms in the purview of content-related grievance redressal mechanism, tech giants of the world are now taking stringent actions for monitoring and regulating content on their platforms and highlighting their enforcement activities.

“As of now, there is no appellate mechanism provided by intermediaries nor is there any credible self-regulatory mechanism in place,” as per the IT ministry. But the government had last year notified IT rules to make digital intermediaries more accountable and responsible for content hosted on their platforms.

The government has also issued a notice to Twitter to comply with all its past orders by July 4, failing which it may lose its intermediary status, which means it will be liable for all the comments posted on its platform.

The recently released report by Meta contains information for a period of 31 days on actions taken against violating content on Facebook and Instagram for content created by users in India and proactive detection rates, as well as information on grievances received from users in the country via grievance mechanisms.

According to the report, Facebook had received 835 complaints through their grievance system which were all addressed but they could only resolve 564 cases. “These include pre-established channels to report content for specific violations, self-remediation flows where they can download their data, avenues to address account hacked issues etc,” the report stated.

Additionally, Meta-owned Instagram had also received a total of 13,869 reports through their Indian grievance mechanism and had responded to all of them but was only able to resolve 4,693 cases, it stated. "Of the other 9,173 reports where the specialised review was needed, we reviewed content as per our policies, and we took action on 5,770 reports in total," the report mentioned.

Furthermore, WhatsApp had also banned over 19 lakh Indian accounts in May, on the basis of complaints received from users via its grievances channel and through its own mechanism to prevent and detect violations, according to the latest monthly report published by the Meta-owned messaging platform.

Twitter in its India Transparency Report of June also revealed that it had received over 1,500 complaints through its local grievance channels between April 26 and May 25. Additionally, the micro-blogging platform had processed 115 grievances which appealed to Twitter account suspensions and resolved them, the report stated.

In the Indian context, Google had received a total of 25,964 complaints from individual users in relation to third-party content which allegedly violated local laws, and infringed intellectual property rights and personal rights on Google’s Significant Social Media Intermediaries platforms.

Out of the 25,964 reports received by Google, over 24,000 complaints involved copyright infringement, 433 involved trademark infringement and 257 dealt with other issues. However, in response to these complaints, Google removed 62,673 content pieces as they breached the community guidelines.

When it comes to the global scenario, company reports revealed that Google had to strike down nearly four lakh bad content pieces through its automated detection process; Twitter had to suspend over 46,500 accounts for violating guidelines through proactive monitoring and Meta had to ‘action’ over 21.6 million content pieces in May.

Out of Meta’s ‘actioned’ content, Instagram accounted for 4.1 million actioned pieces across 12 categories and Facebook accounted for 17.5 million actioned pieces across 13 categories, solely in the month of May, according to the report.

The ‘actioned’ content on Meta’s platforms categorically ranges from bullying and harassment to violent and graphic content, to adult nudity and sexual activity, to child endangerment, dangerous organisations and individuals and to spam among many others.

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