SEBI differentiates legitimate financial education from misleading investment advice and asserts its authority to remove harmful content with cooperation from social media platforms.

The regulator uses an AI tool named Sudarshan to monitor violations across multilingual audio and video content.

SEBI has removed over 120,000 misleading posts by unregistered financial influencers and continues to deploy AI tools to track violations in the digital space.

The statements were provided to ANI on March 2, 2026, with the latest reporting timestamp noted.

SEBI chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey spoke with ANI in an interview, with Financial Express cited in the report.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman criticized derivatives trading by retail investors and signaled regulatory measures in the budget, including a higher Securities Transaction Tax to curb excessive speculation.

Pandey emphasized the deployment of AI to monitor the digital space and identify violations.

SEBI’s approach is calibrated, aiming to regulate without overreach, likening market intervention to a surgeon’s knife rather than a sledgehammer.

Pandey highlighted reforms over the past year and the objective of optimal regulation balancing market development with investor protection.

Regulation is characterized as a careful, surgical process, with the past year described as a year of reform toward optimal regulation without excessive or insufficient oversight.

Post-COVID, social media narratives influenced retail participation in derivatives and options trading, contributing to losses, with data-backed warnings that 9 out of 10 option traders lose money.

SEBI issued data-backed measures and investor warnings, including cigarette-warning-like notices via pop-ups that 9 out of 10 investors lose money when trading options.