Will WhatsApp be banned in India? All you need to know

WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram could face a ban for failing to comply with the new Information Technology rules issued by the Government of India, which come into effect starting May 26.

Except for the indigenous microblogging app Koo, no other platform has complied with the new rules. The government had asked WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram back in February to comply with the newly issued IT rules.

Facebook, on Tuesday, informed that the platform intends to comply with the new rules, and is working towards implementing operational processes.

The new rules require social media platforms to follow additional analysis and require them to appoint a chief compliance officer, nodal contact person and resident grievance officer.

Officials from the ministry of information technology who are familiar with the developments informed the media that social media giants must comply with the new rules as there is a need for a public interface for complaints and the need for an acknowledgement system for requests.

The new set of rules focuses on voluntary verification, a 24-hour time limit for removing content flagged for nudity and the set up of a time-bound grievance redressal mechanism. It also requires the generation of monthly compliance reports, a compliance officer, nodal contact person and a resident grievance officer being appointed by the social media platform companies.

Why is Whatsapp suing the Indian Government?

Messaging platform WhatsApp is, in return, suing the Indian government in the Delhi High Court, challenging the ban and the new IT rules which forces them to break their encryption, potentially revealing the identities of people who had sent and received billions of messages on the platform.

Indians comprise more than 400 million of the 1.2 billion people who use WhatsApp, owned by social media giant Facebook.

Messages and files sent through WhatsApp have been encrypted since 2016, which means that nobody except the sender and the receiver can see the contents of their conversation. And the company has been saying for a long time that this is important for people’s privacy.

However, several governments, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Japan, have been pressuring and banning social media apps like WhatsApp to break their encryptions. The authorities reason that not being able to track who sent what poses a challenge for their law enforcement.

Digital rights organisations like Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Mozilla have supported WhatsApp’s fight to maintain end-to-end encryption.

In a blog post on its official website published late on Tuesday, WhatsApp said that “a government that chooses to mandate traceability is effectively mandating a new form of mass surveillance.” It also said that traceability would violate human rights. 

“Innocent people could get caught up in investigations, or even go to jail for sharing content that later becomes a problem in the eyes of a government even if they did not mean any harm by sharing it in the first place. The threat that anything someone writes can be traced back to them takes away people’s privacy and would have a chilling effect on what people say even in private settings, violating universally recognised principles of free expression and human rights,” WhatsApp’s post said.

Here is how Twitter is reacting to the possible ban on Whatsapp and other popular social media apps in India: