India's tweaking of IT rules allow formation of Centre-appointed panels, that will settle often-ignored user grievances against content decision of social media companies, Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, adding that this was necessitated due to the "casual" and "tokenism" approach of digital platforms towards user complaints so far.
Expressing serious concern over some social media platforms not being able to trace the originator of a message or an online content, a bench of justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose said the government must step in now.
Social media platform X argues that satire, fair comment, and public speech should be protected from takedown orders in personality rights cases during a Delhi High Court hearing involving Baba Ramdev's lawsuit.
The top court also asked the Centre to submit its report in January on the notification of rules by which social media misuse can be checked and liability could be fastened on intermediaries to decrypt messages.
The government on Friday tweaked IT rules to pave the way for setting up of grievance appellate panels, which will settle issues that users may have against the way social media platforms initially addressed their complaints regarding content and other matters.
The government will come out with proposed modalities and terms of references for setting up grievance appellate committees to address social media users' complaints in the next 10-12 days, and expects the panel to be in place by November 30, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Tuesday.
The court is hearing appeals against a CCI order imposing a penalty on Meta and WhatsApp.
The Delhi high court on Wednesday directed Facebook and Google to remove alleged derogatory material related to Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sasikala Pushpa who claimed that her image was being tarnished by purported morphed photos and videos with a man on social media.
A bench of justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose said, "At this stage we do not know whether we could decide this issue or the high court will decide."
Social media giant Facebook has named Spoorthi Priya as its grievance officer for India on its website.
The office will be headed by Twitter executive Peter Greenberger.
The bid by Facebook highlights the company's efforts to accelerate its push into video as it tries to take advertising dollars from television and increase the time people spend on its platform.
'As a platform, we are saying, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes.'
The rights on offer are Indian Sub-continent Television Rights from 2018 to 2027 (10 IPL seasons), Indian sub-continent Digital Rights from 2018 to 2022 (5 IPL seasons) and Rest of the World Media Rights from 2018 to 2022 (5 IPL seasons).
After job cuts at Twitter, Facebook's parent company Meta is planning to begin "large-scale layoffs" this week in what could be the largest reduction to date at a "major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment," a media report said.
Facebook Inc is launching an open platform for online content and application developers to join its Internet.org service.
Mohan will be responsible for aligning of teams, overall strategy in this country and driving Facebook's investments in India
Facebook will now directly compete with Slack, HipChat, Yammer and a few others in this space.
Reliance Jio and Facebook will look to use WhatsApp for delivering goods from local neighbourhood kirana stores to consumers before expanding collaboration in education and healthcare sector, billionaire Mukesh Ambani said soon after announcing the mega Rs 43,574 -crore deal. "All of us at Reliance and Jio are delighted to welcome Facebook Inc," he said in a short video message posted on the group's social media handles.
Social media giant Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name next week. As per The Verge, the company is planning to change its name to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company's annual Connect conference on October 28, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant's ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump responded by saying: "FACEBOOK, which has lost Billions of Dollars in value since "deplatforming" your favorite President, me, has just announced that they are reinstating my account. Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution."
Lenders increasingly looking at your social media profile to evaluate creditworthiness
ShareChat on Thursday said it has raised $502 million (about Rs 3,725 crore) in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tiger Global, valuing the homegrown social media platform at over $2.1 billion. Snap Inc (which owns photo-messaging app Snapchat) and existing investors Twitter and India Quotient, among others, also participated in the funding round in Mohalla Tech, the parent company of ShareChat and short video app, Moj. Founded in 2015, Mohalla Tech has raised over $766 million across six fundraising rounds.
Following the order, the Peace and Harmony Committee of the Delhi Assembly deferred its proceedings, and said it would notify the further course of action and the next date of sitting in due course of time.
The bench of Justice Amit Bansal also sought the response of Meta Inc, the parent company of social media platform Facebook, on an application filed by Vikram Sampath alleging defamatory content has been circulated on the platform.
The government on Saturday issued a notice to Twitter giving it one last chance to 'immediately' comply with the new IT rules and warned that failure to adhere to the norms will lead to the platform losing exemption from liability under the IT Act.
Cristiano Ronaldo muscled his way into Instagram's top-followed ranks this year as he documented his career and growing family, but pop star Selena Gomez still reigned supreme on the social media platform.
Critics say the programme, launched 10 months ago in India in collaboration with operator Reliance Communications, violates principles of net neutrality
'No analogy is perfect, but a better liquid to liken data to is water, with the global internet like a great borderless ocean of currents and tides,' Facebook's vice-president, global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg, said in New Delhi.
The company plans to create a new class of non-voting shares.
While accounts/pages linked to the Congress party appeared to be large in number, the following or reach of pro-BJP accounts was several times more.
The top five most mentioned Twitter accounts in tweets as on Thursday were those of Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) with 16,395 tweets, followed by @BJP4India (BJP's verified Twitter account) with 11,875, @RahulGandhi with 5,398, @INCIndia with 4,202 and @AmitShah with 3,496.
Its internet penetration still matches up poorly to other countries
IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday slammed Twitter for deliberate defiance and failure to comply with the country's new IT rules, which has led to the United States giant losing its intermediary status in India and becoming liable for users posting any unlawful content.
Managing Director Manish Maheshwari, who lives in Bengaluru in Karnataka, was issued notice by the Ghaziabad police on June 17 and asked to report at its Loni Border police station within seven days to get his statement recorded in the case, the officials added.
With the third and final round of layoffs implemented by Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms, Inc. in process globally, India, too, has seen its impact, with some senior executives being asked to leave. Some of the executives to have been impacted are Avinash Pant, India's director of marketing; Saket Jha Sourabh, director and head of media partnerships; and Amrita Mukherjee, one of the directors on the legal team. An email sent to the company did not elicit any comment on the development until the time of going to press.
The blacklisting of Wikipedia comes days after the Pakistan Telecom Authority (PTA) degraded Wikipedia services for 48 hours, threatening to block it if the content deemed 'blasphemous' was not deleted.
Your digital footprints give marketers deeper insights about who their customers are.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has ordered authorities to unblock Wikipedia "with immediate effect", days after the country's telecommunications watchdog banned the online encyclopedia for its failure to remove offensive and blasphemous content.
When the Delhi police served him a notice in May for a case involving tagging some political leaders' tweets as carrying manipulated media, a spirited Maheshwari said he was employed by Twitter Communications Private Limited, and not Twitter Inc, and, therefore, could not help them. The authorities were understandably not pleased.