Parliamentary panel proposes new regulator to monitor Facebook and Twitter

A parliamentary panel in India has urged that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook be treated as publishers and that a regulatory agency be established to monitor them, possibly exposing the corporations to additional accountability for user-generated content.

The high-level group made the recommendations while reviewing the 2019 personal data protection bill, which aims to safeguard users' privacy by imposing rigorous rules on how businesses like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Amazon.com Inc. gather, process, and store data.

In India, these businesses have benefited from "safe harbour" status, which means they can't be held accountable for user-generated material on their platform as long as they follow the Intermediary Guidelines, which were released earlier this year. This has included establishing offices in India, recruiting compliance officers, and complying with government orders to remove specific sorts of information deemed damaging.