Social media companies are working smoothly with the Grievance Appellate Committees (GACs) that hear appeals against content complaints and takedowns, offering little resistance to GAC rulings, a top IT Ministry official and a member of one GAC told The Hindu.
The GACs were set up under the Information Technology Rules, 2021, with a mandate to hear appeals from Indian users against social media firms who have more than 5,00,000 active Indian users. The committees can rule on whether content has to be taken down or reinstated.
In the months leading up to the formal constitution of three GACs, each with three members, social media firms and online intermediaries reportedly worried that these bodies could overrule their community guidelines.
In practice, firms like Meta Platforms Inc, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), have largely been cooperative with the GACs and comply with their orders. GACs have received 2,454 appeals since October 2023, and have disposed of 2,347.
In six transparency reports published by Meta for the period between June and December 2024, the firm said it complied with 100% of the 271 orders it received from the GAC. Google also reported complying with all appeals except one, though the firm has yet to disclose data beyond September 2024. (In the one exception, “the GAC’s directions could not be complied with whilst also preserving Google’s position as an intermediary under Indian law,” the firm said, without providing any details). X has not yet disclosed any statistics on appeals from the GAC.
Ashutosh Shukla, a retired IPS officer who is a member of the second GAC — which he says has handled the majority of complaints filed so far — told The Hindu that social media firms “generally comply” with the GAC’s orders. Union Secretary for Electronics and Information Technology S. Krishnan said in an interview with The Hindu that the GACs have had “a fairly good dynamic”, and that the system has been working smoothly to redress users’ complaints.
The number of appeals has been rising exponentially, Mr. Shukla said. While GAC members work remotely in a “digital” manner, with secretarial assistance from the IT Ministry in New Delhi, he said that the rise in appeals is keeping committee members engaged with the work. Mr. Krishnan added: “If there are more complaints coming to the grievance officers within the company and those complaints are then getting appealed, then it means that the system is working.” (Users are required to first complain to social media firms before approaching the GAC.)
The most common types of complaints, Mr. Shukla said, arise from incidents of impersonation on social media, and hacking. A key aspect of the GACs is their power to overturn ‘deplatforming’ or account suspensions by social media platforms. Mr. Shukla said that the GAC rarely had to invoke this power, and that “generally the suspension [has been applied for] right causes.”
The GACs’ orders are not made public, which has led to some criticism from civil society groups on transparency grounds. Mr. Shukla said that details of individual cases cannot be disclosed to the public, as they contain private information like email addresses, phone numbers, and Aadhaar numbers.
The GAC model of hearing complaints digitally has been replicated in the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 for the yet-to-be-constituted Data Protection Board of India (DPBI), which will hear complaints on personal data misuse and address data breach reports from firms. The DPBI too will conduct its proceedings completely remotely, the IT Ministry said.
Published - January 16, 2025 09:35 pm IST
