Expression Through Socialising Media in India: Why Fixing the Existing Legal Dilemmas Is Critical?

Abstract

The emergence of the social media and its virtual communication space has enabled people at large to interact and communicate from the conventional mode of one-to-one to many-to-many. It exploded onto the technology in the last decades for commercial and entertainment purpose and rapidly it had become very much prevalent globally. Initiated as a friend-finder it went on to the extend encompassing every features of media where the users had a dominant role. When mass media and digital media was through certain modes, social media not only changed the mode but the creators and audience. From passive news listeners, it became active creators and sharers of contents in the form of information. With the enablement of technology, anybody with an internet access and own opinion can be part of social media. Under the guise of user-generated content, be it in sharing of news or opinion or images or videos and now even the live video promoting political, social, cultural aspects, social media do not hold any accountability because only users are producing contents. Also, being an intermediary, it is free from any liability for the user generated data under Indian Information Technology Act, 2008 and the existing global consensus under safe harbour doctrine. The law in this area is still relatively unsettled. The misuse of social media got reported with various incidents of such as impersonation, anonymity, profile account hacking, privacy threats, sexual or aggressive solicitation, cyber-bullying, and many such related serious issues. However, in all these matters, social media was provided with a benefit for its passive involvement of choosing the users or the contents posted. The liability was always on the content producers. It is certain degree of due diligence social media platform needs to observe that too very minimal! This paper endeavours to question the existing privilege available to social media at par with conventional media and also highlights the social-legal dilemma it put forth with unprecedented use of data. It further dwells upon the legal impediments in challenges that social media pose for the lack of legislation- especially for data protection and user profile anonymity detection. It thus attempts to find out whether social media is to be equated like media or should it be viewed as mere platform for people to express. If it is just a platform to express, whether the current Indian legal framework is sufficient enough, to deal with the ramifications arising out of social media especially when most of them are social media companies incorporated and registered under foreign jurisdictions.