Deepfake regulation: It needs to be smarter, not stricter

Not long ago, manipulated videos of Shah Rukh Khan were circulating online, portraying him as endorsing fraudulent investment and betting schemes.

- SHWETASREE MAJUMDER

Abroad, a video of Ukraine's leader asked his country’s troops to surrender before being exposed as a fake. These are not aberrations. They reveal a world where synthetic clips are cheap, fast and eerily convincing.

A 2024 McAfee Labs survey found that 75% of Indian respondents had encountered some form of a deepfake in the past year and 38% had been targeted by a deepfake-enabled scam. Understandably, policymakers want stronger safeguards. The government’s proposed amendments to the Intermediary Guidelines attempt to address these dangers by creating a category of “synthetically generated information” and imposing identification and disclosure obligations. Platforms must permanently label such content through visible markings covering a tenth of the screen or the first tenth of an audio clip and also embed unique metadata into the file. Significant social media intermediaries (with over 5 million registered users) must ask users to declare whether their uploads are synthetic and verify those declarations using technical tools. If users fail to label content, platforms must do it themselves.

This is a major shift from India’s existing safe harbour regime. Section 79 of the IT Act of 2000 shields intermediaries from liability for user-generated content so long as they remain neutral platforms and act promptly on grievances. Now, they would be required to inspect, classify and modify user content before letting it run. This effectively collapses the distinction between a platform and a publisher.