The government has scheduled a meeting from Thursday with social media companies on deepfakes.

Sources said the government is likely to share SoP with the companies on how to deal with such content on their platforms. They said IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw will be at the meeting.

Recently, several 'deepfake' videos targeting leading actors went viral.

Sara Tendulkar, daughter of Sachin Tendulkar, recently made headlines when her deepfake photo with cricketer Shubman Gill went viral.

The meeting comes after the ministry sent an advisory to social media companies, urging them to take action on such AI-generated content.

Vaishnaw said though the intermediaries had responded to the advisory detailing their steps against deepfakes, the government felt they should be doing more. The ministry referred to Section 66D of the IT Act which says if a person is impersonated and cheats using a communication device or computer resource, the person can be punished with imprisonment and liable to be fined.

Under the Information Technology (IT) Rules Sec 3 (1) (b) platforms are obligated to do their due diligence in ensuring that users do not host such content.

Vaishnaw had earlier said: "They are taking steps... but we think that many more steps will have to be taken".

"And we are very soon going to have a meeting of all the platforms... maybe in the next 3-4 days, we'll call them for brainstorming on that and make sure that platforms make adequate efforts to stop deepfakes"