New Delhi, India

India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Friday (Nov 24) announced that it will give social media companies just seven days to align their terms of service and other policies with Indian laws and regulations to address issues related to the hosting of deepfakes on their platforms. 

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As the continues to evolve, deepfake technology has emerged as a major cause of concern globally. Deepfakes are realistic yet fabricated videos created by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms trained on online footage. They are the manipulation of facial appearance through deep generative methods. 

While addressing the media, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said: "Today we had a very longish meeting with all of the important players on the Internet, the Internet intermediaries. And we have raised the issue of deepfakes with them... I reminded them that way back in October 2022, the government of India has been alerting them to the threat of misinformation and deepfakes, which are part of misinformation." 

Also read: India is 'closely monitoring' China's influenza outbreak amid mild Covid scare 

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"The intermediaries today all agreed that the current IT rules under the IT Act provide for adequate compliance requirements on their part to deal with deepfake, even as we speak to future regulations and a future law, which is certainly required, given that our IT Act is 23 years old," he added. 

This comes a day after a top minister said that India is drawing up rules for governing deepfakes. A couple of days ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised concerns over the technology. 

"We plan to complete drafting the regulations within the next few weeks," Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told reporters. 

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Also read: Delhi AQI gets 'severe', environment minister takes stock in review meet 

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Not just India, countries across the world are racing to draw up rules to regulate AI.

The United Nations too has created a 39-member advisory body to address issues in the governance of AI, while European lawmakers have prepared a draft set of rules which could be approved by next month.

Chandrasekhar further added: "It was emphasised to them again, to which they have agreed that the current law and the current act and the current rules provide for compliance requirements by the platforms on misinformation, patently false information and deepfakes. This has been agreed to by the platforms." 

He said that the government has asked the companies to align their terms of use with their users to be consistent with the areas that are prohibited on the Indian internet. The platforms have agreed in seven days to ensure that alignment so that every user is aware.