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Twitter suspends over 500 accounts on Indian government’s order

Technology companies wield a lot of power, but there are some institutions and organisations that they will acquiesce to. These organisations normally reside in the United States and China, but in recent years, India has been flexing its muscle as well. Case in point a recent incident involving Twitter, where the social media platform was instructed to suspend more than 500 accounts in the region.

Why was Twitter instructed to do so?

It looks like the instruction stems from a desire to silence outcries regarding farmer protests in parts of the country over new agriculture laws. The Indian government, based in New Dehli, has issued several warnings to Twitter over the past week or so, citing the country’s own digital laws, and after holding out for a short while, Twitter did as it was instructed.

“Separate to our enforcement under the Twitter Rules, over the course of the last 10 days, Twitter has been served with several separate blocking orders by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act,” explains a lengthly blog post on the incident.

“Out of these, two were emergency blocking orders that we temporarily complied with but subsequently restored access to the content in a manner that we believe was consistent with Indian law. After we communicated this to MeitY, we were served with a non-compliance notice,” it adds.

In order to comply with the order and continue operating in the region, which accounts for an estimated 75 million users, Twitter took the following action:

  • “We took steps to reduce the visibility of the hashtags containing harmful content, which included prohibiting them from trending on Twitter and appearing as recommended search terms.
  • We took a range of enforcement actions — including permanent suspension in certain cases — against more than 500 accounts escalated across all MeitY orders for clear violations of Twitter’s Rules.”

It’s clear that Twitter finds itself in a difficult situation regarding India, which is a country that is dependant on social media platforms to disseminate information to a massive population reliant on smartphones as their primary screens.

Moving forward it will need to tread a very fine line between enforcing policy in order to stop the spread of violence, but also ensuring that important voices are not silenced because of government interference.

“We will continue to advocate for the right of free expression on behalf of the people we serve. We are exploring options under Indian law — both for Twitter and for the accounts that have been impacted. We remain committed to safeguarding the health of the conversation occurring on Twitter, and strongly believe that the Tweets should flow,” the post concludes.

We’ll be keeping a keen eye on this situation to see how it evolves in the coming days and weeks.

[Image – Photo by Akshar Dave on Unsplash]

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