18 Feb India’s Synthetic Media Rules Build Enforcement on the Wrong Foundation
News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESSOn 20 February 2026, India’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026 come into force. The rules, notified by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on 10 February, introduce India’s first regulations for synthetic media (referred to as “synthetically generated information” or SGI in the rules). They mandate labelling, provenance metadata, automated verification by platforms, and drastically shorten the time platforms have to remove flagged content. In November 2025, WITNESS submitted comments to MeitY on the draft rules after consulting with local civil society. We drew on nearly a decade of global research and advocacy on synthetic media, content provenance, and human rights. We made five specific recommendations. Some were partially adopted: the rules now apply only to audio and visual content (not all AI outputs), routine AI-assisted tasks like color correction, noise reduction, transcription, and formatting are explicitly excluded, and an impractical requirement to cover 10% of content with a visible label has been removed. These are genuine improvements, and we welcome the government’s responsiveness to civil society input. However, the final rules contain critical gaps that were not addressed, and introduce new provisions that were not part of the public consultation.
