Few days back, I had written about the impasse of Twitter with Indian Govt, it looks like Twitter doesnot want to follow the law of the land, and govt has clealy gave the indication that they might arrest Twitter’s top executives in India.
Earlier Indian govt had requested Twitter to unblock accounts which are spreading the inflammatory content, especially those with hashtag of farmers’ genocide. Yesterday govt warned the company that they should not test govt’s patience which is wearing out over the refusal of the company to follow the dikkat given under section 69A of IT Act.
During meeting with Twitter executives, Union IT Secretary made it clear that the use of controversial hashtag was neither a journalitic freedom or freedom of expression as such “irrespomsible content could provoke and inflame” the situation. The IT secretary expressed his displeasure over differential treatment over handling the problems on Capital region and Red Fort. He further added that “ Twitter has to follow orders. It is not subject matter of negotiation, as from the list given. Twitter has blocked only 50% of accounts, It is the law of the land and if some one has aproblen then they are free to take a legal recourse. The govt feels that the compliance from Twitter should be immediate, and if they do it hesitatingly or grudgingly, or after 10 days of our orders, then it is not really a case of compliance.
Earlier yeterday Twitter had said, on why they did not clamp down on some accounts “ in keeping with our principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression, we have not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists and politician. To do so, we believe would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian Law”.
Twitter is also saying that directions given to them for blocking the accounts are inconsistent with Indian Laws. They say that, we have acted on govt’s order to block 1400+ accounts
- Reduced visiblity (trending & search) of hashtags containing harmful content.
- Took actions, including permanent suspension in some cases, against 700+ accounts.
- Withheld some accounts within India only. However, these are available abroad.
In the meantime Facebook and YouTube have already adhered to the govt dikkat and removed all content which was deemed objectionable following govt’s direction. As per govt officials these two companies followed the blocking requests and moved very fast.
It looks like Twitter wants to have show down with Indian govt, as its owner himself wrote against Indian govt while tweeting on Farmers’ issue. It looks like Twitter is bent upon approaching the Supreme Court citing this law is violate the fundamental rights to free expression under Indian law.
In my opinion, Twitter has to follow the govt directive and in the guise of freedom of expression they can not ignore govt instructions. Imagine, Twitter doing the same in any Islamic country or in China. It is only in India they can take liberty and allow the hashtags like # Modi planning Farmers Genocide, the name of hashtag like this is clearly anti Indian, on their Twitter handle. Such type of hashtag should have been disallowed from the day 1. In the name of freedom of expression, how come Twitter is allowing such types of hashtags. Imagine hashtags like “ Xi planning— genocide” on Twitter, then what will be Twitter’s fate in the world.
So, Let us see how far Twitter will go in this case.
Waiting for your comments/views, on this blog.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
11th February 2012.