Twitter Legally Challenges Block Orders on Tweets | TechTree.com

Twitter Legally Challenges Block Orders on Tweets

The company, now controlled by Elon Musk, has been on the warpath over freedom of speech and expression for some time now

 

Twitter is on the warpath now. Having acquiesced to most of the federal government's request during the Jack Dorsey era, the company seems to have taken a more aggressive approach since it got acquired by billionaire electric carmaker Elon Musk. And the outcome is a lawsuit in a Bengaluru court alleging abuse of power by the Narendra Modi government. 

The suit was filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bengaluru by Twitter which says New Delhi abused its power by ordering it to arbitrarily and disproportionately remove several tweets from its platform. It also claimed some of these block orders related to political content posted by official handles of political parties. 

“Blocking of such information is a violation of the freedom of speech guaranteed to citizen-users of the platform. Further, the content at issue does not have any apparent proximate relationship to the grounds under Section 69A,” the lawsuit said while alleging that the government threatened criminal proceedings against it if they didn't comply with the orders.  

A slow brewing broth

It's been close to 18 months since Twitter has been at loggerheads with the government that has sought the taking down of several hundred tweets and blocking several accounts. Critics had argued that most of these accounts or tweets were against the ruling government and might not have necessarily fallen into anti-national activities. 

The company, which boasts of close to 50 million monthly active users across India, had complied with several of these requests but did fight back on many others as it didn't fall under the rules that Twitter had framed for accounts to be blocked or tweets to be removed. 

However, India's new IT rules that became effective in 2021 left little room for Twitter to challenge the government's orders as non-compliance would result in criminal procedures being initiated against the compliance officer in the country. 

It all came to head when… 

Things took an ugly turn in May last year when the Delhi Police visited two offices of Twitter in the NCR region seeking information about the company's rationale in labeling a tweet from the BJP's spokesperson as a manipulated media. The cops claimed that a complaint had been filed about such classification and then claimed in an official statement that the company's India head's responses were very ambiguous. 

Twitter went to town claiming that the episode was an act of intimidation and expressed concerns on the use of such tactics by the police in response to enforcement of their global terms of service read in conjunction with the core elements of India's new IT rules. In fact, it led to the resignation of Twitter India managing director Maneesh Maheshwari. 

It remains to be seen how the government responds to this lawsuit and what it means for the Twitter users in the country as well as the Made-in-India Twitter lookalike Koo. 


TAGS: Twitter, lawsuit, Koo

 
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