NEW DELHI: Delhi high
court
on Tuesday took a dim view of
Meta
’s complaints redressal mechanism and said its functioning was “far worse than a govt department.”
It was hearing a plea by a
media house
against blocking of its
page by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, for alleged copyright violations.
“Please be careful.
You have to be alive to the situation. Your system is not working. Your officials need to pull up their socks… can’t have people going around in circles. Your grievance officer in India registers a
complaint
but says ‘can’t take any action’,” an irked bench told advocate Tejas Karia, representing Meta.
A
Delhi HC
bench of acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet PS Arora warned Meta that it should “put its
house
in order” or else the court might pass an order castigating it. It also pulled up the
tech giant
for its insistence that the media house should file a complaint through a proper channel.
The media house also challenged the constitutionality of Rule 3(1)(c) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
Advocate Hrishikesh Barua, representing the media house, highlighted that despite writing to Meta several times and further contacting its grievance redressal officer, the only response he could get was the media house had not “written to the correct channel”.
However, Karia informed the bench that the Instagram page was blocked following three copyright complaints and the email response to the media group was not a decision to reject the complaint, but an automatic reply.
During the hearing, the court asked the
petitioner
’s counsel to register a fresh complaint by filling in the required form that Meta insisted was the proper channel. After a while, Baruah returned to court and said the complaint had been rejected again.
An annoyed bench then told Meta’s counsel, “You may be having billions of users but your house is not in order. He (Baruah) is giving you a grievance complaint number, but you say it is not a complaint. You can’t be stubborn with us and say you are not able to understand what we are saying. We have been more than liberal with you.” HC asked Karia to ensure the complaint of the media house was addressed and listed the matter for further hearing on Wednesday.
