Twitter India interim grievance officer quits

Twitter India Interim Grievance Officer Quits

     Twitter has no grievance officer to address subscribers’ complaints from India. US based microblogging platform’s interim resident grievance officer for India Dharmendra Chatur has stepped down, leaving the micro-blogging site without a grievance official. Its website platform now displays the company's name in the place of a grievance officer for India with a US address and an email ID. The website shows Jeremy Kessel from San Francisco as a grievance-officer.

      Following the new Information Technology rules, WhatsApp, Facebook, SharChat, Telegram, Linkedin have already appointed grievance officers for India as mandated by the new Information Technology rules to address complaints from subscribers in India.

      Twitter’s website no longer displays his name, as required under Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021. Twitter now displays the company's name in the place of grievance officer for India with a US address and an email ID. Twitter had appointed Jeremy Kessel from San Francisco as grievance-officer.

      Twitter in response to the final notice issued by the government on June 5 had said that it intends to comply with the new IT rules and will share details of the chief compliance officer. In the meantime, the microblogging platform had appointed Chatur as interim resident grievance officer for India.

       As per the information, WhatsApp has appointed Paresh B Lal from Telangana as their grievance redressal officer. Facebook named Spoorthi Priya as its grievance officer. Koo has appointed Rahul Satyakam, who is operations manager at Koo, as resident grievance officer. ShareChat has listed Harleen Sethi as its resident grievance officer as well as nodal contact person and G. T. Thomas Phillippe as chief compliance officer. Abhimanyu Yadav is the designated grievance officer for Telegram. LinkedIn has designated its legal policy manager, Tanya Mampilly, as its grievance officer for India.

       The government and Twitter are loggerheads in the past few months pertaining new IT rules and removal of objectionable tweets directed by the government, removal of blue tick from Vice President of India and tagging manipulated media on BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra. Recently, Twitter blocked Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s handle for almost an hour on his tweet in 2017, in which he had posted AR Rehman’s song “Maa Tuje Salam” on a complaint.

        Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information technology came out hard on Twitter last week asked the social media platform to follow the law of the land instead of dilly-dallying. In response, the officials told the panel that “we follow our own policies,” which was strongly objected to by the committee members, who categorically told the Twitter India officials that the company is not above the law of the land.

       The new IT rules which came into effect from May 25 mandate social media companies to establish a grievance redressal mechanism for resolving complaints from the users or victims. The big social media companies are mandated to appoint a chief compliance officer, a Nodal Contact Person and a resident grievance officer. All of them should be resident in India. All significant social media companies, with over 50 lakh user base shall appoint a grievance officer to deal with such complaints and share the name and contact details of such officers.

(Source: The Pioneer)