Safe Harbour protection to Social media under Sec. 79 of IT Act

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Last Updated18/06/2021

Recently, Twitter lost its safe harbour protection (legal protection) in India over its failure to comply with the government’s new IT rules.
This will eliminate the platform’s legal immunity.
Recently, the Government of India announced the New IT Rules for social media platforms in the 'Significant Social Media Intermediaries (SSMIs)' category.

It asks all social media platforms to set up a grievances redressal and compliance mechanism.
appoint a resident grievance officer, chief compliance officer and a nodal contact person.
These platforms to submit monthly reports on complaints received from users and action taken.
For instant messaging apps, they have to make provisions for tracking the first originator of a message.
The IT Rules mandates that significant social media intermediaries must appoint a chief compliance officer (CCO) who would be held liable in case the intermediary fails to observe the due diligence requirements.

Any intermediary shall not be held legally or otherwise liable for any third party information, data, or communication link made available or hosted on its platform
This protection, the Act says, shall be applicable if the said intermediary does not in any way, initiate the transmission of the message in question, select the receiver of the transmitted message and does not modify any information contained in the transmission.
As long as a platform acts just as the messenger carrying a message from point A to point B, without interfering in any manner, it will be safe from any legal prosecution.
The intermediary must not tamper with any evidence of these messages or content present on its platform, failing which it loses its protection under the Act.

In the US, there is Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
This Section 230 states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”.
It means that the intermediary shall only be like a bookstore owner who cannot be held accountable for the books in the store unless there is a connection.