Facebook appoints Spoorthi Priya as grievance officer for India on website

Social media giant Facebook recently appointed Spoorthi Priya as its Grievance Officer for India on its website. 

As per Facebook's website, users can contact Spoorthi Priya - who is the Grievance Officer - through an e-mail ID.

This move was made after the new IT rules that are coming into effect recently as it requires significant social media intermediaries - those with over 50 lakh users - to appoint a grievance officer, nodal officer and a chief compliance officer. These personnel are required to be residing in India.

As per the Facebook page,  users can also contact Facebook in India via post at an address in New Delhi.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp had recently named Paresh B Lal as its grievance officer for India on its website.

As per the media reports, On June 4, the tech company Facebook said that when it assesses content for newsworthiness, it will not treat content posted by politicians any differently from content posted by anyone else. Instead, it will simply apply its "newsworthiness balancing test" in the same way to all content, measuring whether the public interest value of the content outweighs the potential risk of harm by leaving it up.

As per the recent rules applied by the government for tech giant companies, all intermediaries have to prominently publish on their website, app or both, the name of the grievance officer and his/her contact details as well as the mechanism by which a user or a victim may make a complaint.

The grievance officer will have to acknowledge the complaint within 24 hours and dispose of such complaint within a period of 15 days from the date of its receipt, and receive and acknowledge any order, notice or direction issued by the authorities.

Under the new rules, social media companies will have to take down flagged content within 36 hours, and remove within 24 hours content that is flagged for nudity, pornography etc.

If the given rules are not followed by the companies it would result in these platforms losing their intermediary status that provides them immunity from liabilities over any third-party data hosted by them. This basically means that they could be liable for criminal action in case of complaints.

Other social media giants like Google and Twitter are also working on the same.

According to the media reports, Last week, the government had issued a notice to Twitter giving it one last chance to "immediately" comply with the new IT rules and warned that failure to adhere to the norms will lead to the platform losing exemption from liability under the IT Act.