i) Government has notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules 2011 under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act.
These rules require that the Intermediaries, including national and international social networking sites and matrimonial sites, shall observe due diligence while discharging their duties and shall inform the users of Computer resources not to host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, update or share any information that is harmful, objectionable, affect minors and unlawful in any way.
The said rules also require the intermediaries to appoint Grievance Officers to address the grievances received from users and affected individuals / organizations as and when received by them.
ii) Government issued the an advisory on 17th August 2012 to all the intermediaries, including national and international social networking sites, advising them to take necessary action to disable inflammatory and hateful content hosted on their web sites on priority basis.
iii) Government also conducts awareness campaign on the issue to educate users.
iv) The Government is in regular dialog with the intermediaries including social networking sites for effective and efficient disablement of such content.
Giving this information in written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha today, Shri Kapil Sibal, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, said that a total no. of 3, 45, 37 and 36 cases of fake accounts/ profiles on various social networking websites were reported to Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in the year 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 (till November) by various Law Enforcement Agencies. CERT-In, further, contacted these social networking websites for disabling of fake accounts and for getting user access details of these fake accounts/ profiles.
Shri Sibal said that in most of the cases, such fake accounts were successfully disabled in association with social networking sites, having offices in India. However, success rate is low in disabling accounts and getting information from social networking sites having offices abroad.
