Grievance appellate committee mechanism for social media complaints in offing

The government plans to set up appellate committees to redress grievances that users may have against the way social media platforms initially addressed their complaints regarding content and other issues, officials said.

While tech giant Meta (which owns Facebook and WhatsApp) and microblogging site Twitter have been pushing for a self-regulated grievance appellate framework, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) wants adjudications to be done by three-member grievance appellate committees.

The panels will be constituted by tweaks in the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.