Information technology Act implications on social media and cybercrime

Social media is seen as a key platform for freedom of expression: anyone with access to the internet can create an account, which allows them to express their own opinions on a daily basis, through tweets, status updates, and photographs. Freedom of expression is considered to be a basic human right, so in this respect we can praise social media for furthering the fulfilment of this human right, through its accessibility. Freedom of expression is an integral part of freedom to information. An interesting example of the role of social media in freedom of information was, Twitter’s decision to revoke the use of an account called ‘Politwoops’, which let the public see tweets politicians had deleted. This account was shut down as Twitter suggested its use violated the politician’s privacy settings. However, it has now been reinstated to allow public transparency and freedom of information. An ideal world we would like to assume that our social media pages are a safe place for us to express ourselves. On the one hand, social media is an excellent resource for enabling the human right of freedom of expression, but on the other hand, it does pose deeply problematic questions regarding self-censorship and surveillance. Social media platform is garnering attention like never before. With lockdowns and nowhere to go people are hooked to Social media like never before. It is become the go to place for all sorts of news, socializing, learning and arguments. In India an estimated 11 gigabits data is consumed by mobile users on social media. The overall mobile data consumption in the country is increased by 47%during the Covid affected lockdown in the year 2019.The speed of internet is one another factor on which every person working from home is investing on. In this constrained physical socializing space and increased dependency on social media, there are concerns about the contents posted by the social media users. The data analysis shows intrusion into privacy, derogatory posts and personal data protection problems and hoax messages on the social media. However, to address the real impact of social media on freedom of expression,the meaning of ‘freedom of expression’ must be defined. The exceptions to this rule are when an ‘expression’ directly, and violently, threatens another person or group. Though there are certain regulatory controls through new law and regulations. IT ACT was enacted in the year2000 in India, it is continuously evolving with the time and new regulations are being incorporated continuously. This paper is an exclusive study of main regulations imposed by the IT Act in India. The paper also discusses the loss of immunity clause for the organizations which are not abiding the recent restrictions. An exclusive case study is presented on much discussed social media platform “Twitter, in this paper. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), Government of India also set up experts committee to identify key data protection issues in India and recommend methods of addressing them. This paper analyzes the existing Information Technology Act 2000. The paper examines main provisions of the IT Act and the Rules that provide for the protection of personal data, the kind of personal data that they apply to, as well as some of the criticisms of these provisions and their enforcement.