Government-related news will only be fact-checked by the Indian government's press arm under a new misinformation policy, the IT Ministry clarified yesterday. Speaking to Economic Times on Thursday, India's IT Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar added that representatives from social media companies told the Ministry that they'd prefer that non-government-related news be fact-checked by a self-regulatory organisation (SRO). "We will not bring out any notification till they [the industry] come up with a structure for an SRO," Chandrasekhar said. The government is expecting proposals from Twitter, Meta, and Google on the matter. The proposed policy mandates that platforms take down information fact-checked to be "fake or false" by the Press Information Bureau (PIB), or any other agency authorised by the Central government. The Bureau's fact-checking unit was set up in 2019 to counter 'misinformation' related to the government’s policies and schemes circulating on various social media platforms. Why does this matter? Multiple concerns about the proposal were flagged when people had to submit feedback on it. For one, the proposal has no benchmarks for what true or false information is, nor any details on how fact-checking will be carried out. The government could use these opaque standards to "fact-check" information that is critical of it as false. That could result in a form of censorship—with serious impacts on free speech, as experts speaking to MediaNama have noted: “The added implication is that the deciding authority is, under law, being made the singular arbiter of truth on the Internet. There is no way to ensure objectivity or accountability…
