Apar Gupta on Why India’s New IT Rules Could Scale Up Online Censorship

IFF's Apar Gupta points to the lack of safeguards, oversight, and transparency around these new provisions.

Apar Gupta, co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, breaks down the key takeaways of the IT Rules amendments. 

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

On 22 October, the Union government released fresh amendments to the IT Rules. Besides mandating AI labelling and other compliance measures, the new rules also cement the government’s powers to send takedown notices to online platforms.

Apar Gupta, co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, breaks down the key takeaways, and speaks to The Quint about the amendments leading to a “parallel censorship regime.” He points to the lack of safeguards, oversight, and transparency around these new provisions and explains how this could affect users, empower authorities, and make censorship orders even less accessible to the public. This amendment will come into effect on 15 November.

Gupta discusses how there has been no public consultation for the part of the amendment seemingly referring to the Sahyog portal provision, which until now was being done through office memorandums.

This comes a month after X lost its case in the Karnataka High Court challenging the creation of Sahyog.

Watch the full video.