From Safe Harbour To Synthetic Truth: India’s 2026 It Rules Amendment And The Constitutional Future Of AI-Generated Content
- IJLLR Journal
- 2 days ago
- 1 min read
Saransh Patwal, Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Patiala
I.INTRODUCTION
In October 2023, a digitally manipulated video of actress Rashmika Mandanna circulated across Indian social media platforms, which triggered an emergency advisory from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. This incident exposed a regulatory flaw in the intermediary liability jurisprudence: what happens when harmful content is not merely shared by an intermediary, but it is fabricated with?
India’s regulatory response was seen by the 2026 amendment to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules, imposing affirmative obligations on the social media platforms to detect, disclose, and remove “synthetically generated information” (SGI).
This article argues that while the regulatory action is constitutionally legitimate, but the structure of the 2026 amendment is defective. By transforming the intermediaries from spectators to active arbiters with no requirement that the content actually causes harm or not, no proportionate limits, and no one to keep a check on them, they would end up silencing a lot of legitimate speech just to avoid getting in trouble. Through legal analysis and comparative examination, this work proposes an alternative to preserve the regulatory objective while protecting the freedom of speech which is threatened.
