NEW DELHI — Twitter has sued the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over an escalating attempt to control content available on open platforms in India.
Twitter’s suit, The New York Times reported, was filed in the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore and “challenges a recent order from the Indian government for the company to remove content and block dozens of accounts. Twitter complied with the order, which had a Monday deadline, but then sought judicial relief. A date has not been set for a judge to review Twitter’s suit.”
As XBIZ reported, in early June, India’s increasingly powerful Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology published proposed new rules that would give the government sweeping control over social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit as well as digital news publications and streaming sites, including the power to punish them for “porn” and “obscenity.”
Led by Modi, a religious nationalist with authoritarian tendencies who came to power in 2014, the government “wants to arm itself with powers to overturn decisions of top social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and Instagram to suspend, block or remove accounts of users over various violations, and is also seeking new levers that will force the internet majors to take down content when directed on a user’s complaint,” India’s leading newspaper, The Times of India, reported last month.
India is currently in the middle of a media-driven “porn panic” centered around a case involving Bollywood celebrities who invested in an X-rated online startup.
According to The New York Times, the lawsuit announced today “is the first legal challenge that the company has issued to push back against laws passed in 2021 that extended the Indian government’s censorship powers. The rules gave the government oversight of Twitter and other social media companies, allowing the authorities to demand that posts or accounts critical of them be hidden from Indian users.”
Executives at the companies, the Times added, “can face criminal penalties if they do not comply with the demands.”
The nation's 2021 IT Rules ask social media platforms “to inform their users that they should not post content which is ‘ethnically objectionable,’ ‘harmful to child,’ ‘insulting another nation’ or is ‘misleading in nature.’”
Main Image: India's Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who appointed him