Key Points
New Delhi: The proposal to form a fact-check unit for identifying false, fake or misleading online content related to the business of the central government was in response to requests by social media intermediaries, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said Tuesday, adding that anyone who characterises the IT rules as being arbitrary has not read them...
The fact-check unit proposed as part of an amendment to the governments Information Technology (IT) rules last year has drawn criticism as a potential portal for government censorship on online content...
Replying to a query on censorship concerns related to a government-mandated body deciding what content is right and what is wrong, the minister said it is a misreading and misunderstanding of the rules.. There is nothing subjective about patently false (content), he said..
If you say 1+1=3, that is patently false even the fact-check unit (for which) a comedian went to the Bombay High Court and the court, in a split decision, has said that this needs to be referred to a third judge intermediaries wanted help from the government in determining what is wrong and right about the government because no third party can determine (that, as) only the government has information for it, he said...
Asked about the impact of AI eating into content creation on digital content publishers, the minister said it is an important and almost existential question about these platforms, especially generative AI platforms, scraping the internet and using publicly available content to train their models...
