New Delhi: Hearing challenges to the Information Technology Rules amendments, a bench of the Bombay high court questioned the Union government’s intentions behind the new guidelines, as the latter said humour or satire against it was always welcome – with some exceptions.A division bench of Justices G.S. Patel and Neela Gokhale was hearing on September 26, petitions challenging Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2023, filed by comedian Kunal Kamra, the Editors Guild of India, the Association of Indian Magazines and the New Broadcast and Digital Association.The rules empower the government to form fact-checking units which, through Rule 3, can identify news it deems is “fake, false or misleading information”. This is the Rule being challenged by the petitioners.The news agency PTI has reported that the bench noted that the new rules to ostensibly curb fake news on social media give “unfettered power” to a government authority in the absence of “guidelines and guardrails”.The court also asked what necessitated the amendment and provision for a separate fact-checking unit when the Press Information Bureau (PIB) has already been checking facts on social media.“You have a PIB which has its presence on social media. Why then was this amendment required and for an FCU to be set up? I think this amendment wants to do something more,” Justice Patel said, according to PTI.Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who is counsel for the Union government, said the PIB was “teethless” (sic).However, the PIB’s social media posts in this regard have also been criticised for being misleading.An proposed feature of these amendments at their draft stage had been that any news that has been deemed “fake” by the PIB will have to be taken down by all platforms, including social media platforms. However, the final version did away with this suggestion and instead called for a fact-checking unit.Meanwhile, the SG Mehta said that there is not the slightest possibility of humour or satire having anything to do with the new IT Rules.“Any humour or satire against the political government whether we like it or not, has nothing to do with this regulation. Unless the humour doesn’t cross boundaries like abuse or pornography. Humour satire is always welcome in any manner. It cannot be proscribed. The government is only concerned with false facts going around coupled with the fact that we are dealing with anonymous media. There is not a remotest possibility of any humour, any comedy or any satire coming under this regulation,” Mehta said, according to Bar and Bench.Notably, Kamra, a petitioner in this case, has had two contempt of court cases registered against him over works of satire.At the hearing, SG Mehta claimed that the Rules don’t contain penal provisions, don’t criminalise anything, and were only meant to “regulate content and resolve disputes between the sender of content and the aggrieved person.”He also claimed that content flagged by the fact-checking unit can be taken down, added a disclaimer to or ignored by the intermediaries.The court asked the government why this amendment was required at all, if the government was not going to ask intermediaries to abide by the fact-checking unit’s suggestions.“On one hand, there is a larger public interest and on the other hand there is a statute that has words that are ambiguous. Will it ever allow us to insert words of qualification that do not exist? How do we read information as fact and how can ‘shall’ (mentioned in the rule 3) be given a different colour to save the safe harbour provision? Is it permissible to interpret provisions like this?” the court asked, according to Bar and Bench. Hearings on this will continue today.