India’s information innovation ministry on Wednesday kept in touch with social media companies asking them details about their compliance status with the country’s new social media rules. The deadline to consent to the principles was Tuesday, May 25.

The letter was addressed to all “significant social media intermediaries”, which basically implies social media companies having in excess of 5 million registered clients in India and envelops all significant tech companies including Facebook, Twitter, Google, and WhatsApp, among others.

Entrackr has seen a duplicate of the letter and its authenticity was confirmed by a senior government official and a tech organization that received it.

Aside from seeking the compliance status with the new standards, the letter looked for details like the contact information of the companies’ chief compliance officer, nodal contact individual and resident grievance officer. It likewise looked for companies’ physical contact addresses in India.

The IT Rules 2021, notified in February, require social media companies to appoint a compliance officer, who is responsible for ensuring their compliance with the Information Technology Act. Companies are likewise required to appoint a nodal contact individual for 24×7 coordination with law authorization agencies. The resident grievance officer should follow up on complaints about any violation of the standards by these companies.

“If you are not considered as SSMI [significant social media intermediary], if it’s not too much trouble, provide the purposes behind the equivalent including the registered clients on every one of the services provided by you,” the letter said.

The public authority has requested that the companies react to the letter “ideally by today [May 26] itself”.

However, a senior government official told Entrackr on the condition of anonymity that there is no hard deadline as such to react to the letter since “companies can not possibly appoint compliance, nodal or grievance officers overnight, and the public authority would not like to be unnecessarily anti-business”. “We’re simply nudging them towards compliance at the earliest opportunity,” the official added.

Resistance with the principles will bring about the companies losing their “intermediary” status, which removes safe harbor protection available to social media companies and frees them up to increased litigation.

A Facebook representative said that the organization “aim[s]” to conform to the provisions of the IT rules and “continue[s] to discuss a couple of the issues which need greater commitment with the public authority”. “Compliant with the IT Rules, we are working to implement operational cycles and improve efficiencies,” the representative said.

A Twitter representative declined to remark when gotten some information about the organization’s compliance status with the new social media rules. Local microblogging stage and Twitter’s chief rival Koo, however, said that it has complied with the standards and implemented a due diligence and grievance redressal mechanism upheld by an Indian resident chief compliance officer, nodal officer and grievance officer.

At the point when gotten some information about Google and YouTube’s compliance status, a Google representative did not plainly specify whether the two companies were compliant with the principles and said that they have “consistently invested in significant item changes, assets, and staff to guarantee that we’re combating illegal substance in an effective and fair manner”.

The letter comes a day after Facebook-possessed WhatsApp, the most well known individual messaging application in the country, and a significant social media intermediary, sued the Indian government over the new social media decides claiming that they might actually compel the organization to break its start to finish encryption security, making individual messaging on the stage less safe for clients across the world.

Because of WhatsApp’s lawsuit, information innovation minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that “none of the actions proposed by India will impact the ordinary functioning of WhatsApp in any way whatsoever and for the normal clients, there will be no impact”.

“The public authority of India is committed to guarantee the right of privacy to every one of its citizens and yet it is additionally the responsibility of the public authority to maintain the rule of law and guarantee national security,” he added.