Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Union Minister, pointed out the failure of Twitter to comply with New Information Technology rules. Ravi Shankar Prasad tweeted that Twitter has “deliberately chosen the path of non-compliance”.

“There are numerous queries arising as to whether Twitter is entitled to safe harbour provision. However, the simple fact of the matter is that Twitter has failed to comply with the Intermediary Guidelines that came into effect from the 26th of May,” Prasad said.

All the social media companies were given 3-month time period to comply with the newly introduced IT Rules, 2021 and the time ended on May 25^th.

It is astounding that Twitter which portrays itself as the flag bearer of free speech, chooses the path of deliberate defiance when it comes to the Intermediary Guidelines,” the minister said.

Who knew that Corona would bring tears to the life of comedian-youtuber Bhuvan Bam, who made everyone laugh. Losing his parents is the most difficult time for any human being, Bhuvan also had to face this harsh moment. Bhuvan lost both his mother and father in the devastation of Kovid-19. He shared his pain of losing his parents by sharing an emotional post on Instagram.

Everything fell apart within a month – Bhuvan

Within a month, Bhuvan lost both his mother and father forever. He wrote- I lost both my lifelines due to Covid. Nothing will be the same without Ai and Baba. Everything is shattered in a month. Home, dreams, everything. I do not have my mother, Baba is not with me. Now you have to learn to live from the beginning. I don’t feel like I’m ready.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bhuvan Bam (@bhuvan.bam22)

Bhuvan asked these questions to himself

After losing his I-Baba, Bhuvan is raising many questions about himself. He further writes- Was I a good son? Did I try my best to save them? I will have to live with these questions forever. Can’t wait to see them, I hope that day comes soon.

Rajkumar-Diya told this thing to Bhuvan

Bhuvan is consoled by his friends and celebs. Many celebrities including Shriya Pilgaonkar, Rajkumar Rao, Tahira Kashyap, Mukesh Chhabra, Shirley Sethia, Dia Mirza have consoled Bhuvan. Rajkummar Rao wrote – I am sad for your loss brother, you have done a lot. I myself am the one who lost both his parents so I can say that they never leave you, their blessings are always with you. Dia Mirza wrote- The wide smile on his (Bhuvan’s Eye-Baba) face and the happiness in the eyes tells that you were a good son Bhuvan, our love and strength are with you

Cheating case: Uttarakhand Police has uncovered a big fraud. Uttarakhand STF has arrested an accused from Noida in a cheating case of Rs 250 crore. The surprising thing is that this fraud was done in a span of just 4 months.

The fraud was carried out with an app made under China’s startup scheme. This app has been downloaded by about 50 lakh people in the country. Through this app, people were lured to double their money in 15 days.

In order to double the money in 15 days in the fraud, first people were asked to download the power bank app, after which they were lured to double the money in 15 days.

The whole matter was revealed when the Haridwar resident informed the police that he had deposited 93 thousands and 72 thousands respectively twice to double the money from a “power bank app” which was supposed to double in 15 days.

But when that did not happen, the victim lodged a complaint with the police station, on which the police registered a case and started investigation. Investigation found that all the funds were transferred to different accounts. When the financial transactions were studied, a fraud of 250 crores came to the fore in the hands of the police.

SSP Ajay Singh said that after investigation, Uttarakhand STF has arrested Pawan Pandey, an accused in the case from Noida. 19 laptops, 592 SIM cards, 5 mobile phones, 4 ATM cards and 1 passport have been recovered from the accused. STF found in the investigation that this money is being sent abroad by converting it into cryptocurrency.

On Tuesday morning, many major websites were hit by Internet outrages. It affected many famous news websites and social media sites. Some of these websites include Amazon, Twitch, Pinterest and Spotify.

Many global news websites such as the New York Times, CNN and the Guardian were impacted. Even Quora was inaccessible for Indian users. Some of the other sites that were impacted are PayPal, Vimeo, GitHub, Hulu, Stack Overflow and HBO Max. The home pages of these websites was sowing an ‘Error 503’ message.

The Guardian’s UK technology correspondent Alex Hern tweeted informing that this internet outrage has been traced to a failure by Fastly in a content delivery network.

In a thread he said, “As well as bringing down some websites entirely, the failure also broke specific sections of other services, such as the servers for Twitter that host the social network’s emoji.”

“Fastly, a cloud computing services provider, has been identified as the cause of the problem. The company runs an “edge cloud”, which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.”, Hern added.

Later, Fastly, on its status page, said that the problem has been identified and a fix has been implemented. It also informed that customers may experience increased origin load because of the return of the global services.

We have read a lot about Google Photos in the last few days. For example, we will not be able to upload free photos from June 1. But this is not the only thing, it is more than this. Because from 1st June most of the Gmail account users are going to be affected.

The first thing is that if you have been using Google Photos to backup, then from tomorrow it will not be free. The second thing is that you have to understand how many photos or videos are uploaded in Google Photos.

There are three types of photos videos uploaded in Google Photos. These have high quality, compressed quality and original quality. High quality and compressed quality are still free. But there is still money to be paid for the original quality.

From tomorrow you will have to pay

From tomorrow you will have to pay for uploading all three quality on Google Photos. How much money will have to be paid and whether Google’s plan will tell about it further. Before this, know what you are getting.

If you have a Gmail account, you will get 15GB of space. This space is not just for uploading photos and videos, but everything will be in this space. Everything means emails of all your Gmail, photos of Google Drive and photos or videos uploaded on Google Photos. In such a situation, this space is not much for the hardcore smartphone users. What will happen to the previously backed up photos?

Actually, Google has given some relief to the people here. There will be no need to make any changes to the pics or videos stores on your Google Photos before June 1. Because Google has said that it will not count in 15GB of space. That is, you can leave the old photos and use them anytime later. If tomorrow your account shows 15GB full, then you have to remove the space by deleting the emails or photos of the account. Because emails will not be sent or received in case the space becomes full.

Price For Google Photos

Talking about plans, you will get monthly and annual plans here. You have to pay 130 rupees every month or Rs 1,300 a year for 100GB. For 200GB, you have to pay Rs 210 per month or Rs 2,100 per year. For 2TB space, you have to pay 650 rupees every month or 6,500 rupees a year.

The Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) has issued a guideline for social media influencers advertising through digital media platforms such as Instagram. According to the new guidelines, all promotional content published by social media influencers must have a disclosure label that clearly states that the content is an advertisement.

Also, according to the new rule, influencers will also have to perform due diligence for the products or services promoted through their account. ASCI says that it is important that customers understand that something is being promoted with the intention of influencing their opinion or behavior for business benefits.

According to a report, the new rules will come into effect from June 14. After this, it will be mandatory for influencers to properly label a content. So that the customer can understand whether your content is an advertisement or not.

According to ASCI, the label issued on the content should be well visible to all customers and there should be no scope of misunderstanding. In addition to these orders, ASCI has asked influencers to review and verify themselves before showing an advertisement for a product to the audience. The Draft guidelines were first released in February.

ASCI issued guidelines for Social media influencers

ASCI has stated in the new rule details that influencers must add disclosure in their post only when there is a material connection with the advertiser. This connection includes compensation of money, free gift, or any other agreement that has been discussed between the two. If there is no material connection and influencers are informing the audience about a service or product of their choice, then it will not be considered an advertisement and no disclosure will be required.

According to the new rules, for videos of 15 seconds or less, the disclosure label must be at least 3 seconds. At the same time, in two minutes or longer videos, the label must be in that part of the video the whole time, when a service or brand is being promoted. Similarly, in videos longer than 15 seconds but less than 2 minutes, the label should be up to one-third of the length of the video.

Twitter spoke about the new digital rules made by the government and showed concerns over the potential threat they impose to the freedom of expression. Twitter said that they will strive to comply with these laws but plan to ask the government to make some changes to the elements in the rules that inhibit open conversations.

Even Whatsapp has recently sued the government, calling their rules unconstitutional and unfriendly to users’ privacy.

“Twitter is deeply committed to the people of India. Our service has proven vital for the public conversation and a source of support for people during the pandemic. To keep our service available, we will strive to comply with applicable law in India. But, just as we do around the world, we will continue to be strictly guided by principles of transparency, a commitment to empowering every voice on the service, and protecting freedom of expression and privacy under the rule of law,” said a spokesperson of Twitter.

“Right now, we are concerned by recent events regarding our employees in India and the potential threat to freedom of expression for the people we serve. We, alongside many in civil society in India and around the world, have concerns with regards to the use of intimidation tactics by the police in response to enforcement of our global Terms of Service, as well as with core elements of the new IT Rules. We plan to advocate for changes to elements of these regulations that inhibit free, open public conversation. We will continue our constructive dialogue with the Indian Government and believe it is critical to adopt a collaborative approach. It is the collective responsibility of elected officials, industry, and civil society to safeguard the interests of the public.”

Twitter has recently been asked to remove certain tags and block certain people recently. It seems to be that they are on the radar of the government.

WhatsApp reached the Delhi High Court against the new digital rules of the government. WhatsApp has appealed to the court to ban the new digital rules as it is against the privacy of users. WhatsApp has said in the court that this law is unconstitutional because the privacy of the users is endangered by it.

According to the news agency, Reuters WhatsApp is against the new digital rules. In the new digital rule, social media companies will have to tell a post on who asked it first. WhatsApp is getting affected the most by this new rule.

WhatsApp told our partner website India Today Tech why it is challenging the Indian IT Rules Challenge. According to a spokesperson of WhatsApp, tracking a user’s chat means that the fingerprint of each message will be with WhatsApp. This will disrupt the privacy of the user who has his fundamental rights. We will continue to negotiate with the Government of India and try to find a solution to this. In this, if any legal valid request comes to us, then we will provide all the information we have about it.

WhatsApp has been asked about the new rule, who are posting wrongly, just have to give information about them. The company has said that it cannot give information of anyone alone because the messages on the platform are encrypted end-to-end. Due to this encryption system, neither WhatsApp nor any third person can see or read a message.

To obey these rules, it has to break the encryption of the messages of both the receiver and the sender. WhatsApp is expressing the inability to obey the new rule.

Controversy is going on between the government and big tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter. A new twist came when the police went to Twitter’s office a few days ago. Last week Twitter had labelled BJP’s spokesperson Sambit Patra’s post as a manipulated media.

Intermediary Guidelines have also been created by the government for large social media platforms. According to these guidelines, the social media platforms whose user base is more than 50 lakhs have to keep the resident complaints officer, the chief compliance officer and the nodal contact person.

For this, the government had given three months’ time which ended on 25 May. There are many controversies about this as well. Although Facebook has now said that it will accept the government’s new rule, in some places, there is a need for clarification.

Twitter donates 15 Million USD to Indian organizations to help them battle the Covid-19 crisis caused by the deadly second wave of coronavirus.

The money was given to three different non-government organizations—Care, Aid India and Sewa International USA. Care has been given 10 Million USD and the other two have received 2.5 Million USD each.

“Sewa International is a Hindu faith-based, humanitarian, non-profit service organisation. This grant will support the procurement of lifesaving equipment such as oxygen concentrators, ventilators, BiPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure) and CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machines as part of Sewa International”s ‘Help India Defeat COVID-19” campaign,” the company said in a statement.

Sewa international’s vice president Sandeep Khadkekar thankey Dorsey, the ceo

“Our administrative costs are about five per cent, meaning that every dollar a donor offers, we spend 95 cents of it on the work that it is earmarked for. In these past two weeks, we have seen how overwhelmed India’s healthcare system is, and we want to do as much as we can to come to the aid of people who are deeply affected. Twitter”s generosity will go a long way in helping us do the work we want to do, and that we need to do,” he said.

Twitter said, “Funds will be used to supplement government efforts by setting up temporary COVID-19 care centers; providing oxygen, PPE kits and other critically needed emergency supplies for frontline health workers; and addressing vaccine hesitancy and helping ensure that people get vaccinated, particularly in remote, marginalised communities in India.”

India can use all the help it gets at the moment as the second wave is severely affecting the country. India has been recording over 4 lakh cases every day until Monday when recorded cases stood at 3.66,161.

Central government sent a notice to Twitter about the government’s handling of Covid-19 and said that some tweets are not incompliance with India’s IT law. Therefore, twitter blocked several tweets and some of those were made by popular handles such as, Revanth Reddy, Moloy Ghatak, Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das.

Twitter didn’t mention which tweets have been blocked and neither have they stated the reason why they have been blocked; They just sent a notice to the users saying that their tweets were violating an Indian law. Twitter was asked to take legal action against specific tweets and the reference they have received is to the Indian IT Act,2000.

Most of the deleted tweets were about scarcity of resources to treat Covid-19 patients and some were also about the Kumbh Mela of Haridwar.

A few months ago also, twitter was asked to block some handles when the farmers’ protest was gaining momentum and now it’s the second time that government has told them to do so amid the second wave of coronavirus in India.

Twitter issued an official statement after being contacted the government that said, “When we receive a valid legal request, we review it under both the Twitter Rules and local law. If the content violates Twitter’s Rules, the content will be removed from the service. If it is determined to be illegal in a particular jurisdiction, but not in violation of the Twitter Rules, we may withhold access to the content in India only.

In all cases, we notify the account holder directly so they’re aware that we’ve received a legal order pertaining to the account. We notify the user(s) by sending a message to the email address associated with the account(s), if available. The legal requests that we receive are detailed in the biannual Twitter Transparency Report, and requests to withhold content are published on Lumen.”