India's Tougher Rules on AI in Social Media Spur Censorship Fears

The Modi government in India is set to enforce tougher rules on the use of artificial intelligence on social media to combat a flood of disinformation. It is also considering a ban on children accessing social media.

The first move aims to counter the increasing wave of fake videos and other fraudulent and abusive content, but it has also prompted warnings of censorship and an erosion of digital freedoms.

The new regulations are set to take effect on Friday (February 20) – the final day of an international AI summit in New Delhi featuring leading global tech figures – and will sharply reduce the time platforms have to remove content deemed problematic.

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Flood of fake content

With more than a billion internet users, India is grappling with AI-generated disinformation swamping social media.

Companies such as Instagram, Facebook and X will have three hours, down from 36, to comply with government takedown orders, in a bid to stop damaging posts from spreading rapidly.

Stricter regulation in the world’s most populous country ups the pressure on social media giants facing growing public anxiety and regulatory scrutiny globally over the misuse of AI, including the spread of misinformation and sexualised imagery of children.

But rights groups say tougher oversight of AI, if applied too broadly, risks eroding freedom of speech.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already faced accusations from rights groups of curbs on freedom of expression targeting activists and opponents, which his government denies.

The country has also slipped in global press freedom rankings during his tenure.

The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a digital‑rights group, said the compressed timeframe of the social media take-down notices would force platforms to become “rapid-fire censors”.

AI-manipulated media must be labelled

Last year, India’s government launched an online portal called Sahyog – meaning “cooperate” in Hindi – to automate the process of sending takedown notices to platforms including X and Facebook.

The latest rules have been expanded to apply to content “created, generated, modified or altered through any computer resource” except material changed during routine or good‑faith editing.

Platforms must now clearly and permanently label synthetic or AI‑manipulated media with markings that cannot be removed or suppressed.

Under the new rules, problematic content could disappear almost immediately after a government notification.

The timelines are “so tight that meaningful human review becomes structurally impossible at scale”, IFF chief Apar Gupta said.

The system, he added, shifts control “decisively away from users”, with “grievance processes and appeals operate on slower clocks”, Gupta added.

‘Automated censorship’

Most internet users were not informed of the authorities’ orders to delete their content.

“It is automated censorship,” digital rights activist Nikhil Pahwa told AFP.

The rules also require platforms to deploy automated tools to prevent the spread of illegal content, including forged documents and sexually abusive material.

“Unique identifiers are un-enforceable,” Pahwa added. “It’s impossible to do for infinite synthetic content being generated.”

Gupta likewise questioned the effectiveness of labels.

“Metadata is routinely stripped when content is edited, compressed, screen-recorded, or cross-posted,” he said. “Detection is error-prone.”

Responsibility shifted to platforms

The US-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), in a report with the IFF, warned the laws “may encourage proactive monitoring of content which may lead to collateral censorship”, with platforms likely to err on the side of caution.

The regulations define synthetic data as information that “appears to be real” or is “likely to be perceived as indistinguishable from a natural person or real-world event.”

Gupta said the changes shift responsibility “upstream” from users to the platforms themselves.

“Users must declare if content is synthetic, and platforms must verify and label before publication,” said Gupta.

But he warned that the parameters for takedown are broad and open to interpretation.

“Satire, parody, and political commentary using realistic synthetic media can get swept in, especially under risk-averse enforcement,” Gupta said.

At the same time, widespread access to AI tools has “enabled a new wave of online hate “facilitated by photorealistic images, videos, and caricatures that reinforce and reproduce harmful stereotypes”, the CSOH report added.

In the most recent headline-grabbing case, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok sparked outrage in January when it was used to make millions of sexualised images of women and children, by allowing users to alter online images of real people.

“The government had to act because platforms are not behaving responsibly,” Pahwa said. “But the rules are without thought.”

Age restrictions also being debated

Meanwhile, India is discussing age-based restrictions with social media companies, IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Tuesday, following moves by Australia and other countries to ban young teens from popular platforms.

Vaishnaw, speaking at the big AI conference in New Delhi, also said stronger rules were needed on deepfakes, although he also hailed an expected $200 billion in AI investment over the next two years.

Australia has since December required TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and a host of other top social media services to remove accounts held by under-16s, or face heavy fines.

Last month, French lawmakers passed a bill that would ban social media use for under-15s, which awaits a Senate vote before becoming law.

“This is something which has now been accepted by many countries that age-based regulation has to be there,” Vaishnaw told reporters at the AI summit.

“Right now we are in a conversation regarding deepfakes, regarding age-based restrictions with the various social media platforms and… what is the right way to go about this,” he said.

A state minister in India’s Andhra Pradesh had previously said it was preparing the ground for a ban on children using social media, but Vaishnaw’s remarks are the first indication of national action from the world’s most populous country.

“We need much stronger regulation on deepfakes,” Vaishnaw said. “It’s a problem which is growing day by day. And certainly there is a need for protecting our children, protecting our society from these harms.”