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Proposed law aims to tackle growing misinformation challenge: Karnataka minister
State IT minister Priyank Kharge also dismissed concerns of overreach, and said the Bill will not create any new laws but will merely draw on existing legal provisions
Bengaluru: Defending Karnataka’s proposed Misinformation Regulation Bill, state IT minister Priyank Kharge on Friday said the draft was not an attempt to criminalise free speech or penalise citizens, but a framework to tackle “growing digital misinformation” and “malicious fake news.” He stressed that the Bill will exclude “satire, parody, opinion, art, and dissent,” ensuring “humour and creativity” are not curtailed.
“Our focus is strictly on misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and fake news. Nothing beyond that. The Bill is in no way an attempt to silence dissent or critiques of the government,” Kharge said.
The minister also dismissed concerns of overreach, and said the Bill will not create any new laws but will merely draw on existing legal provisions, including the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), to identify and curb false information within constitutional bounds.
He reiterated that a leaked 11-page draft that circulated in June this year, which had earned much backlash for threatening censorship instead of fixing the problem of growing disinformation, was fake and itself an instance of misinformation.
The new Bill, Kharge said, was a framework that will stand the scrutiny of courts unlike the Union government’s “Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2023 that was held unconstitutional and hence struck down by the Bombay high court last year.” The Congress government is currently finalising the draft, which is expected to be tabled during the State Assembly session in Belgavi next month, the minister said.
Kharge was speaking at an event organised by Ikagai Law and the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru.
