We are all familiar with WhatsApp, the most popular instant messaging platform in the world. And we all know about the WhatsApp group. One or more people as group admins decide who will form the group and bring them all under one umbrella and run a WhatsApp group. As a result, WhatsApp group admins have quite a few additional capabilities to operate the group as a hartakarta-bidhata.
However, no matter how much power is at hand, if someone in the group commits any dishonest activity, the responsibility will fall on the person concerned as well as the group admin. Depending on who is sharing what kind of content in the group or if someone does something illegal but as a result the group admin may go to jail along with the person concerned – such news is always circulating on social media, and a number of such incidents have been witnessed recently. However, this time the Kerala High Court released the group admins from this responsibility. Let us know a little more about the subject.
New decision of Kerala High Court, relief to group admins
The Kerala High Court has made it clear that the group admin will not be held responsible for any member posting offensive content to the WhatsApp group. Justice Kauser Edappagath said no law has yet been enacted to hold WhatsApp group admins guilty in such cases. Undoubtedly, this recent ruling of the Kerala High Court has brought extreme relief to WhatsApp group admins. But what happened so suddenly that the Kerala court was forced to give such a verdict?
According to reports, this whole case involves child pornography. One person created a WhatsApp group called ‘Friends’ in 2020, and that’s why he was the admin of that group. He later added a friend to the group as a co-admin. But after being added as a co-admin, the person posted pornographic videos of small children in the group. As a result, according to the usual rules, co-admins, as well as group admins, are found guilty under the IT Act.
The hearing in the case was organized on the basis of an application filed by the WhatsApp group admin. The group admin claimed complete innocence in the court and after reviewing all his claims thoroughly, the court concluded that the group admin concerned was not directly involved in the incident and had no intention of being involved in such criminal activities. As a result, in such a situation, if any member of the group shares any offensive content in the group, the admin cannot be held responsible for it in any way.
In that case, just as the Kerala High Court’s decision exempted the admins involved in the incident, so too many more group admins are likely to be released in the future with the example of this case. Not only that, if such incidents had happened before, many group admins might have already got relief from such incidents!
