Centre’s Meta talk: all edge, no order
A report says Delhi told Meta to fix deepfakes. The paper trail so far: rules, advisories — and silence on any actual notice.
The Centre’s rules are on record; the reported notice is not.
A report doing the rounds says the Centre asked Meta to take “corrective action” on deepfakes and is eyeing whether its recommendation engines still qualify it as an “intermediary”. The claim rests on unnamed sources; no ministry, notice or meeting record is on the table.
What is on the record: the BJP-led Centre amended the IT Rules on 10 February 2026 to cover synthetically generated information, and told platforms to deploy technical measures, label AI content with traceable metadata, and remove unlawful posts within three hours of a court or government direction, according to its own answers in Parliament on 25 March 2026. That sits on top of Section 79 of the IT Act, which shields intermediaries only if they don’t initiate transmissions, pick receivers or tinker with the content, and if they follow due diligence.
Meta, for its part, said back in February 2024 that it was working with the Misinformation Combat Alliance, expanding fact-checking and labelling AI-made images where detectable. A current response from Meta to the reported talks was not publicly available in the material reviewed.
The leap from “rules exist” to “Meta was told, legally, to do X” needs a document: a notice, a show-cause, a named official. The BJP-led Centre has published plenty of advisories; it has yet to publish this ask.