High Court On India Govt’s New IT Rules For Fake News: ‘Can’t Bring Hammer To Kill Ant’

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court on Friday made some observations on the recently-amended Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, which won’t be music to the Central government’s ears.

Hearing a bunch of petitions challenging the IT Rules, a division bench of Justices Gautam Patel and Neela Gokhale said the new rules against fake content on social media against the government may be excessive, reported PTI.

In a telling comment, the court quipped that one cannot ‘bring a hammer to kill an ant’.

Justices Patel and Gokhale remarked that they can’t understand the need behind the amendment to the Rules and stated find it difficult to understand one authority of the government being given absolute power to decide what is fake, false and misleading content.

The court said the Rules were also silent on the boundaries of what is fake, false, and misleading.

The court observed that in a democratic process, the government is as much a participant as a citizen is, and hence a citizen has the fundamental right to question and demand answers and the government is duty-bound to respond.

Stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra, the Editors Guild of India and the Association of Indian Magazines have filed petitions in the high court against the IT Rules, terming them ‘arbitrary and unconstitutional’ and claiming that they would have a chilling effect on the fundamental rights of citizens.

The court questioned who will fact-check the Fact Checking Unit (FCU), that is to be set up under the amended Rules.

“There is an assumption that what the FCU says is undeniably the ultimate truth,” Justice Patel said.

The Central government, on April 6, promulgated certain amendments to the IT Rules, including a provision for a fact-checking unit to flag fake, false or misleading online content related to the government.

The three petitions seek that the court declare the amended Rules unconstitutional and direct the government to restrain from acting against any individual under the Rules.