In light of the significant financial and socio-economic risk for the consumers, especially youth and children, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting today issued advisories againsts online betting platforms to refrain from showing advertisements and surrogate advertisements of such sites.
The Ministry had earlier issued an Advisory on October 3, 2022 for private television channels and for digital news publishers and OTT platforms advising them to refrain from showing advertisements of online betting sites and surrogate advertisements of such sites. Similarly, it had also issued an advisory on June 13, 2022 where the Ministry had taken strong exception to the publication/transmission on various media platforms of advertisements/promotional content of betting platforms/sites and had strongly advised media to refrain from transmitting such content, including their depiction as news websites or such other activities in a surrogate manner.
The advisory was supplemented with evidences which contained direct and surrogate advertisements of offshore betting platforms such as Fairplay, Lotus365, betwayscores,Panther777, Khiladi.com and 1xBet
The Ministry expressed its exception to such practices and urged all stakeholders, including the media platforms and the various online advertisement intermediaries, to immediately refrain from showing such advertisements/promotional content in any form whatsoever. Additionally, it informed that in the event news publishers, and others that are found to be not adhering to the aforementioned advisory, the Government would be constrained to take appropriate action under the various statutes.
While issuing the advisory, the Ministry had made mention of the fact that betting and gambling is an illegal activity and hence advertisements/promotion of such
activities directly or indirectly on any of the media platforms falls foul of the various statutes, including under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, the Press Council Act 1978, Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 and others.
Furthermore, the Ministry also brought into attention the Norms of Journalistic Conduct of the Press Council which mentions that “newspapers should not publish an advertisement containing anything which is unlawful or illegal……….. “, and further that “The newspapers and periodicals should scrutinize the advertisement inputs from ethical as well as legal angles in view of the editor’s responsibillity for all contents incuding advertisement, under Section 7of PRB Act, 1867. Revenue generation alone cannot and should not be the sole aim of the Press, juxtaposed much larger public responsibility”.