[7] During Monsoon session of the Parliament in 2018 a motion on “Misuse of social media platforms and spreading of fake news” was admitted.

The Minister of Electronics and Information Technology accordingly made a detailed statement of the "resolve of the Government to strengthen the legal framework and make the social media platforms accountable under the law".

"[9] The move followed a notice issued to WhatsApp in July 2018, warning it against helping to spread fake news and look on as a "mute spectator".

[14] On 21 September 2019 the Centre informed the Madras High Court bench under Justice M Sathyanarayanan that deliberations on the Draft Rules 2018 had been completed.

The amendments were seen by many to "overstep the aforesaid intention sparking concerns of violating free speech and privacy rights of individuals.

"[17] It is seen that "the guidelines suffer with excessive delegation of powers and shift the burden of responsibility of identification of unlawful content from a government/ judiciary to intermediaries.

[23][21][22] Various issues have been pointed out with the rules such as restriction of free speech, requirements such as automatic identification and removal of content, and lack of elaboration on how the five million users will be calculated.

[14] BSA (The Software Alliance) wrote to MeitY to "exclude enterprise cloud service providers" from the scope of the Rules and to remove the filtering obligations.

Furthermore, Twitter refuses to comply with those very regulations in the Intermediary Guidelines on the basis of which it is claiming a safe harbour protection from any criminal liability in India.

This was brought on by Twitter's failure to comply with the new rules with a filing stating that the company failed to appoint executives to govern user content on the platform.