Twitter sues Indian Government, against Order to maintain Modi Government Image

 Twitter sues Indian Government 

Twitter sues Indian Government

Twitter said on Tuesday that it had sued the Indian government, escalating the social media company’s fight in the country as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks more control over critical online posts.

Yes, there were rumor's that current Indian government pressurizing most of the social media platforms including Twitter to have a tight control on content which might impact the Modi government, also pressurizing to not remove any fake content publish by the Modi supporters, or any fake content in favor of current Indian government.

On Tuesday Twitter’s suit, filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, challenges a recent order from the Indian government for the company to remove content and block dozens of accounts. 

According to internal Twitter sources, the government forcing to remove accounts mostly belongs to Independent Journalist, socialist, opposition politician and non profits groups  who reveling the ground reality and questioning the government. 

Irony is, the top influential accounts who posting fake content and spreading communal tensions, are followed by top BJP leaders including home minister, no action has to be taken on their post order by current Indian Government, from twitter intern sources. 

The New York Times:

The New York Times

(Experts said the Indian government’s move to force Twitter to block accounts and posts amounted to censorship, at a time when the government is accused of weaponizing a loose definition of what content it finds offensive to go after critics)

In February 2021, Twitter permanently blocked more than 500 accounts and moved an unspecified number of others from view within India after the government accused them of making inflammatory remarks about Mr. Modi. Twitter said at the time that it was taking no action on the accounts of journalists, politicians and activists, saying it did not believe the orders to block them “are consistent with Indian law.”

In May 2021, the police in India raided Twitter’s offices after the company decided to label tweets by politicians from Mr. Modi’s party “manipulated media.” Those tweets attacked opposition members who had been using the platform to criticize Mr. Modi and what they called his government’s stumbling response to the pandemic.

And in recent weeks, the police in New Delhi arrested Mohammed Zubair, a co-founder of a prominent fact-checking website, for a 2018 tweet that shared an image from an old Bollywood film. The government said the image was causing communal disharmony, after a Twitter account with just a few followers and only one tweet complained about it and tagged the Delhi police. That account disappeared soon after.

Last week, Twitter was ordered to block tweets from Freedom House, an American nonprofit organization that mentioned India as an example of a country where press freedom was on the decline.

“It is telling how an international report about India’s press freedom rankings is responded to with censorship, rather than debate and discussion,” said Apar Gupta, the executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “It is an undemocratic and authoritarian response.”

Lawyers and technology experts said Twitter and other social media companies were caught between a rock and a hard place. They are required to comply with the country’s laws, but they are also challenging them to uphold freedom of speech in the world’s largest democracy.

“I think they are fighting a losing battle, because, on the one hand, they’re taking the government to the courts, but, on the other hand, they tend to cave in,” said Salman Waris, a lawyer at TechLegis in New Delhi who specializes in international technology law.