Have appointed interim grievance officer as per new IT rules: Twitter informs Delhi High Court

Twitter on Monday informed the Delhi High Court that it has appointed a Grievance Redressal Officer (GRO) in compliance with Centre’s new information technology rules. The micro-blogging site has appointed Dharmendra Chatur, a partner designate from the law firm representing Twitter at the Delhi High Court, as an interim grievance redressal officer.

Twitter told the court that the officer was appointed on May 28 in compliance with the rules. According to the report by Bar and Bench, Senior advocate Sajan Poovayya appearing for Twitter told Justice Rekha Palli that the entity which falls under the significant social media intermediary (SSMI) category under the new IT Rules, has appointed a GRO by a letter. The new rules require SSMIs to comply with additional due diligence such as appointing a chief compliance officer, nodal contact person, resident grievance officer.

The Court was hearing a plea, filed by lawyer Amit Acharya on May 26, raising grievance that the Twitter GRO’s details could not be found when a complaint was sought to be made against certain objectionable tweets by two verified users. The petition alleged that the “objectionable tweets” were made by TMC MP Mahua Moitra and journalist Swati Chaturvedi.

The petitioner has also argued that Twitter has appointed a US resident as the Grievance Officer but the same “is not in true sense implementation of the Rule 4 of Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules 2021”. Justice Rekha Palli listed the case for next hearing on July 06.

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Large digital companies like Google and Facebook have begun updating their websites to reflect the appointment of the grievance officers under the new social media rules that came into effect recently.. The new rules require significant social media intermediaries – those with other 50 lakh users – to appoint a grievance officer, nodal officer and a chief compliance officer. These personnel are required to be resident in India.