Social media accounts to be linked to Aadhaar: TN government | Fusion - WeRIndia

In order to prevent fake news on social media, the government is taking several measures.

Now, the Tamil Nadu government has suggested linking the Aadhaar number of users with their social media accounts to prevent the fake news, defamatory and pornographic content.

Attorney General KK Venugopal, appearing for the state government on Monday told Supreme Court that linking of Aadhaar card with their social media profiles was essential to prevent anti-national and terror contents in addition to fake news.

In this context, he added that even though WhatsApp claims that the messages are end-to-end encrypted, an IIT Professor said that that the originator of a message can be traced.

Facebook Inc. said that it cannot share the Aadhaar number with a third party as it does not have access to it.

The plea would be heard today by a bench of Justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose.

Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi appearing for Facebook said the question is whether Aadhaar can be shared with a private entity or not due to the involvement of large public interest.

Facebook contended that there are four petitions, two in Madras High Court, one in Bombay and one in Madhya Pradesh High Courts with similar pleas.

Rohatgi said that different High Courts have different observations in this matter and it would be better to transfer all these cases to the Supreme Court.

He also said that Tamil Nadu police is saying that Aadhaar number should be used to link the profiles of the users.

He added that no one needs to tell them how to run their platforms; they have end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp and even they do not have access to the content of the users. Hence they cannot reveal the Aadhaar number of users to others. They also have to protect their users’ privacy.

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