The government is best positioned to fact-check misleading and false information about itself, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Ashwini Vaishnaw said in Parliament on Friday.

Vaishnaw was responding to a question by Trinamool Congress’s Rajya Sabha MP Dola Sen, who asked the Centre if it was true that the Supreme Court and the Bombay High Court had stayed the creation of the Press Information Bureau’s fact check unit this year.

The Supreme Court on March 21 had stayed the Centre’s notification from a day earlier of a government-run fact-checking unit with the power to label any information about the Union government as fake.

The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2023, which gave the Centre the power to set up a fact-checking unit will remain inoperative till the challenge to their constitutional validity is decided by the Bombay High Court.

On Friday, Vaishnaw defended the 2023 amendment to the rules, stating that the point of contention pertains to who is the right authority to give data or information related to a particular ministry or department.

“The amendment in the IT Intermediary Rules which has been stayed by the honourable Supreme Court is still under contest but the fundamental principle is, our point is that anything related to the government of India, only the government of India can say whether it is a correct fact or a wrong fact,” he said.

The new rules said that the ministry would notify a fact-checking body with the power to label any information “in respect of any business of the Central government” as “fake or false or misleading”.

Intermediaries, which include social media platforms, e-commerce companies and web-hosting services, will be obligated to ensure that no user hosts, displays or shares such information, according to the new rules.

If they do, they would lose their safe harbour privilege, which protects social media intermediaries from legal action for content posted online by their users.

According to the amendments, if a court or the government notifies an intermediary that something labelled “fake news” has been hosted on their platforms, the intermediaries will have to then take down the content within 36 hours.

The amendments were challenged in the Bombay High Court last year.

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