A day after Twitter raised concerns over the new IT rules, public interest litigation has been filed against the micro-blogging site for non-compliance with the guidelines that came into effect on May 26.

The PIL, filed by one Amit Acharya, has been registered by the Delhi High Court and is likely to be listed for hearing on Monday.

Under the new IT rule, every significant social media intermediary has a responsibility to appoint a Resident Grievance Officer in India who will act as single point authority for receiving and disposing of complaints within a fixed time frame. The PIL states that Twitter failed to appoint a Resident Grievance Officer to redress the complaints of its users, and this violates the provisions of the new IT rules.

‘False’ tweets

“The petitioner, when scrolling his Twitter on May 26, found some of the tweets of two individuals very defamatory, false and untrue. When he tried to register his complaint with the Resident Grievance Officer against the alleged defamatory and untrue tweets, he found no details of the officer on the Twitter page, which is a clear violation of subrule 2(a) of Rule 3 which says that the intermediary shall prominently publish on its website, mobile-based application or both,” the PIL states.

The two individuals who have been named by the petitioner in the PIL have political affiliations to the opposition parties.

“It is submitted by the petitioner that while looking for the details of the Resident Grievance Officer, the petitioner found on the page of Respondent No. 3 that it has appointed a US resident, Jeremy Kessel, as Grievance officer which is not in true sense implementation of Rule 4 of Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules 2021,” the PIL said.

On Thursday, Twitter had said it was concerned about the new rule that makes the compliance officer of the company criminally liable for content on the platform.

The American company said the requirements for proactive monitoring, and the blanket authority to seek information about its customers represents dangerous overreach that is inconsistent with open, democratic principles.

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