Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Thursday said that social media platforms must share revenue fairly with content creators, including journalists, conventional media houses, influencers, professors and researchers, stressing the need to ensure equitable distribution of earnings across the digital ecosystem.

According to an IANS report, the minister said individuals and organisations generating content — whether news professionals, creators from remote areas, or academicians sharing research — deserve a fair share of the revenue generated by digital platforms. He emphasised that the principle of fair revenue sharing must be established across the ecosystem to support sustainable growth.

Vaishnaw noted that social media platforms benefit significantly from the content uploaded by individuals and organisations, and therefore creators should receive their rightful share. He added that ensuring fairness in revenue distribution would help strengthen India’s digital content economy and encourage wider participation in content creation.

His remarks come at a time when the government is tightening rules around digital platforms to enhance accountability and transparency. In a related development, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) last year proposed amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, aimed at tackling the growing challenge of deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation.

Under the proposed framework, social media platforms will be required to clearly label synthetically generated content and embed permanent metadata or identifiers. Major social media intermediaries with more than five million registered users in India — such as Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat — would need to ensure that AI-generated content is prominently marked.

The draft rules specify that identifiers must cover at least ten percent of the visual display in videos or images, or the first ten percent of the duration in audio content. The metadata must remain unalterable and cannot be suppressed or removed. Platforms that knowingly allow unlabelled or falsely declared AI-generated content could be deemed to have failed to exercise due diligence under the Information Technology Act.

The government believes that such measures, alongside fairer revenue distribution, will strengthen India’s digital ecosystem by protecting creators’ interests while promoting responsible use of emerging technologies.