India’s deepfake challenge calls for smart regulation, not heavy-handed rules

A 2024 McAfee Labs survey found that 75% of Indian respondents had encountered some form of a deepfake in the past year and 38% had been targeted by a deepfake-enabled scam. Understandably, policymakers want stronger safeguards. The government’s proposed amendments to the Intermediary Guidelines attempt to address these dangers by creating a category of “synthetically generated information” and imposing identification and disclosure obligations. Platforms must permanently label such content through visible markings covering a tenth of the screen or the first tenth of an audio clip and also embed unique metadata into the file. Significant social media intermediaries (with over…