Tech and Advocacy

18 Feb India’s Synthetic Media Rules Build Enforcement on the Wrong Foundation

On 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.

17 Feb Trust in What We See: What the AI Impact Summit Must Get Right on Audiovisual Truth

A welcome shift, an incomplete frame Global leaders are convening in New Delhi for the India AI Impact Summit 2026, the first in this series to be hosted by a Global Majority country. WITNESS will be participating as part of civil society. There is a welcome shift here. Where Bletchley Park and Paris were dominated by catastrophic risk and technical safety, India’s framing pivots towards development impact: AI for the informal economy, frugal AI, democratizing access to compute, and Global Majority agency. These are priorities civil society has long championed. But a development framing without a human rights framework is incomplete. As Amba Kak of the AI Now Institute and Astha Kapoor of the Aapti Institute have argued, low and middle-income countries risk advertising their populations as a path to scale for AI companies without attention to harms or creating guardrails. The summit’s language of “safe and trusted AI” is not a synonym for rights-respecting AI. Rights-based frameworks create legal clarity and predictable obligations; “trust and safety” language leaves compliance open to interpretation. As Adebayo Okeowo, WITNESS’ Associate Director of Programs and Regional Engagement, notes: “A development-first approach to AI is welcome, but development without rights protections has never served

06 Feb Privacy-First Transparency: WITNESS Response to the First Draft EU AI Act Code of Practice

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | dennesemae

When you interact with a chatbot, view a deepfake video, or encounter AI-generated content online, should you know about it? This question sits at the heart of one of the most consequential policy processes currently underway in Europe. Article 50 of the EU AI Act establishes that people must be made aware when they interact with AI systems, including realistic synthetic media. The decisions being made now will shape not just user awareness, but the very infrastructure of trust in digital content especially during a period of coordinated disinformation campaigns and what scholars have termed as worst case scenarios of “epistemic collapse or fracture”. Since November 2025, the European Commission has been convening experts from various stakeholder groups regarding Article 50 of the AI Act’s Code of Practice, specifically the Code of Practice on Transparency. The primary objective of this framework is to develop measures that will facilitate the identification of AI-generated or manipulated content, as well as enhance transparency for users and establish clear guidelines for deployers and developers of AI systems. This Code of Practice will shape how AI tools, from chatbots and generative media to emotion-recognition, biometric categorization and deepfake technologies, inform users when they are interacting

14 Nov WITNESS calls on India to develop an innovative, interoperable and effective AI Transparency regulations

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

On November 6, WITNESS submitted comments to the Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology (MeitY) in response to the Draft IT Amendment Rules “in relation to synthetically generated information”. WITNESS welcomes the government’s recognition of the growing impact of AI-generated content. However, we caution that the proposed framework remains too broad and platform-centric to achieve genuine transparency or accountability. This current amendment provides the potential for over-broad content takedowns that could stifle freedom of expression, arts, satire, and journalism. Drawing on nearly a decade of work at the intersection of AI transparency, detection, provenance, and human rights, WITNESS believes India can lead globally by creating a dedicated, risk-based AI Transparency Framework aligned with international best practices. Effective governance must move beyond simplistic “AI or not-AI” binaries and instead focus on how content is created, disclosed, and used. The goal should be process transparency, not punitive or reactive content moderation. WITNESS Executive Director Sam Gregory notes: “We cannot regulate AI by only regulating intermediaries; we must build the infrastructure of trust through transparency, provenance and accountability through every stage of the AI pipeline.” We also echo the perspective of India’s leading digital rights organization, the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), which has

13 Nov WITNESS joins open letter urging EU to stop plans that could weaken digital rights protections

News and Events, Tech and Advocacy | WITNESS

This week, WITNESS joined 127 civil society organizations, trade unions, and public interest advocates in signing an open letter urging the European Commission to halt plans that could weaken core digital rights protections in Europe. The proposal, known as the Digital Omnibus or Digital Package on Simplification, seeks to review and “streamline” existing EU digital laws, but could in fact roll back essential safeguards for privacy and accountability online. Among the laws at risk are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which ensures people have control over their personal data, the ePrivacy framework, which protects online communications from intrusive tracking, and the AI Act, the EU’s first major law to regulate artificial intelligence and prevent harmful or discriminatory uses of the technology. As highlighted in WITNESS’ recent submission to the European Commission, simplification efforts should not come at the expense of human rights. WITNESS stands with partners across Europe in calling on the Commission to strengthen, not dismantle, these hard-won protections, ensuring that technology serves people, not power. The letter’s content is the following: The EU must uphold hard-won protections for digital human rights We 127 civil society organisations, trade unions and defenders of the public interest write to emphasise

Tech and Advocacy

18 Feb India’s Synthetic Media Rules Build Enforcement on the Wrong Foundation

17 Feb Trust in What We See: What the AI Impact Summit Must Get Right on Audiovisual Truth

06 Feb Privacy-First Transparency: WITNESS Response to the First Draft EU AI Act Code of Practice

14 Nov WITNESS calls on India to develop an innovative, interoperable and effective AI Transparency regulations

13 Nov WITNESS joins open letter urging EU to stop plans that could weaken digital rights protections

Join our fight to fortify the truth and defend human rights.