Author: Abhishek Purohit, Student at Jindal Global Law School
INTRODUCTION
The new Information Technology Rules 2021 or precisely The Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, 2021, were rolled out on 26th February. This code has been formulated by the government of India, exercising its authority under section 87(2) of ‘The Information Technology Act, 2000’, and in line with the Intermediary Guidelines issued in 2011. It differentiates between different social media entities based on their user-base, and segments it into two categories which are Social Media Intermediaries (having less than 50 lakh users) and Significant Social Media Intermediaries (having more than 50 Lakh Users), and few provisions of this code apply differently to both. Also, it has different provisions for OTT Platforms and for publishers of news and digital media. In crux, it is quite an extensive legal framework, that calls for many alterations in the digital media sphere, few of which are discussed in the subsequent section.
